"D. J. Taylor's moving assessment cuts through George Orwell's iconic status to reveal a man who is uncertain about his writerly gifts and far less doctrinaire than previously thought. We meet a social critic who concealed a pronounced authoritarian streak, a supporter of classless society whose first thought for his adopted son was to enroll him at Eton. Orwell's journey through the literary world of the 1930s and 1940s is characterized by the myths he built around himself. Whether as reluctant servant of the Raj in 1920s Burma, mock down-and-outer in Paris and London, or courageous Spanish Civil War soldier (who when asked what he was fighting for, replied, "Common decency"), the circumstances of his life are sharply at odds with the image Orwell carefully and effectively stage-managed. As his friend Anthony Powell maintained, George Orwell was half in love with the thing he was rebelling against." "Drawing on a large body of previously unseen papers and numerous interviews with friends and others who knew him in his years of obscurity, Orwell, published for the centenary of his birth, is a human portrait of the writer too often embalmed as a secular saint: a man who combined modesty and a life of chilling detachment with warmth and gentleness, and who battled through illness to produce two twentieth-century masterpieces."--BOOK JACKET.