![]() Orwell didn’t, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Catalonia-and that made him a heretic on the left. Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. And in the Trump era, it’s a best seller. It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984. So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn’t prepared for its power. ![]() Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. ![]() In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. ![]() I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. ![]() Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. ![]()
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