Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

Volume 11 from The Complete Works of George Orwell
The most important document that has come to light regarding Orwell's Spanish experiences is the deposition charging him and Eileen with espionage and high treason, a charge unknown to them. This is fully analyzed and can now be read in the context of the disputes that then divided the Left, well illustrated by the letters and documents printed here, notably his bitter response to "Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. This volume also includes a sequence of letters that throws a completely new light on Orwell's personal relationships.

George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist. From his earliest published article in 1928 to his untimely death in 1950, he produced an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected--and illuminated--the fraught times in which he lived and wrote. "As soon as he began to write something," comments George Packer in his foreword to this new two-volume collection, "it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge--in short, to think--as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent."

"Facing Unpleasant Facts "charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites classics such as "Shooting an Elephant" with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these narrative essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plainspoken and brilliantly complex.