1984

george orwell

The year 1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of "negative utopia"—a startlingly original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing, from the first sentence to the last four words. No one can deny the novel's hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions—a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.

Genres classicsfictionscience fictiondystopialiteraturepoliticsnovelsschoolaudiobookfantasy

328 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published June 8,1949

Literary awards

prometheus hall of fame award, audie award, goodreads choice award,

This edition

Format: 328 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published: July 1, 1950 by New American Library
ISBN
ASIN
Language: English

Characters More characters

Big Brother

the dark-eyed, mustachioed embodiment of the Party who rules Oceania...
Obrien

About fifty year old. He wears glasses. A member of the Inner Party who poses as a member of The Brotherhood, the counter-revolutionary resistance, in order to deceive, trap, and capture Winston and Julia. OBrien has a servant named Martin.m...
Emmanuel Goldstein

ostensibly a former leader of the Party, counter-revolutionary leader of the Brotherhood, and author of The Book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Goldstein is the symbolic enemy of the state—the national nemesis who ideologically uni...
Tom Parsons

Married with two kids....
Syme

...
Julia

Julia is a 26-year old girl who lives in a hostel with 30 other girls. She operates the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth....

About the author

george orwell

Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both authoritarian communism and fascism), and support of democratic socialism.
Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.
Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.