Shooting an Elephant

A collection of eighteen essays by the author of Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm, etc. these represent the last of his finished work. There is excellent reading here, whether it be the title piece on the English colonial attitude, or his thoughts on books, poetry, cigarettes, a report on a hanging and a death, reflections on Gandhi, a toad, English murder, and other assorted topics, and in the field of the essay this provides fine style as well as stimulating thinking. For the selective reader as well as his established followers. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

George Orwell (whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair) was born in 1903 in India and then went to Eton when his family moved back to England. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, and experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). He lived in Paris before returning to England, and Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1936. After writing The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia (his account of fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War), Orwell was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco where he wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War Orwell served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC. His political allegory Animal Farm was published in 1945 and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him into worldwide fame. George Orwell was taken seriously ill in the winter of 1948-1949 and died in London in 1950.