Portal:Freedom of speech/Selected article/14

The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism, essays, books, and fiction written by the British writer Eric Arthur Blair, pen name George Orwell (1903–50). Orwell was a prolific writer on topics related to contemporary English society and literary criticism, whom British newsweekly The Economist in 2008 declared "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture." His non-fiction cultural and political criticism constitutes the majority of his work, but Orwell also wrote in several genres of fictional literature. Orwell is best remembered for his political commentary as a left-wing anti-totalitarian—as he explained in the 1946 essay "Why I Write", "every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." To that end, Orwell used his fiction writing as well as his journalism to defend his political convictions. He first achieved widespread acclaim with his fictional novella Animal Farm and cemented his place in history as a novelist with the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four shortly before his death. While fiction accounts for a small fraction of his total output, these two novels are his best-selling works, having sold almost fifty million copies in sixty-two languages by 2007—more than any other pair of books by a twentieth-century author.