World Review. 1950.
A year and a half after Orwell’s death, the London magazine, World Review, devoted most of its June 1950 issue to articles that summarized and evaluated the unique place he had occupied on the English literary scene. As Bertrand Russell wrote in a brief appreciation, Orwell’s was a tragic life, “partly owing to illness, but still more owing to a love of humanity and an incapacity for comfortable illusion.”
“Prophet Of Our Own Age”
The publication of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four catapulted Orwell to international fame. A writer known through most of his career to a small circle of readers suddenly became a literary star. Orwell, however, was not destined to enjoy the limelight for long. Afflicted since his youth with weak lungs and often neglectful of his health, he died of pulmonary tuberculosis on 21 January 1950. Testimonies to Orwell and memoirs of him by friends and associates soon began to appear. The year 1984 and the 2003 centenary of his birth saw an outpouring of tributes, biographical studies, and critical assessments. Always admired for his clear and vivid writing and honest reportage, Orwell was increasingly acclaimed for his unflinching defense of political and other freedoms and his prophetic warnings about the drift toward a world of totalizing power (whether by the Left or the Right) in which the “very concept of objective truth” is swept away.
George Orwell. James Burnham and the World of Today. London. 1946.
James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution a very scarce pamphlet today, offered Orwell’s reflections on James Burnham’s influential 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution. Orwell’s vision of the future world geo-political set-up—that of tripolar super states warring against each other in shifting alliances—derived partly from Burnham’s book.