The Book That Made Orwell

The book that won George Orwell his reputation as a serious writer was neither Animal Farm nor Nineteen Eighty-Four but a work rarely read today, The Road to Wigan Pier. Written ninety years ago in the summer and fall of 1936, it transformed Orwell from a little-known book reviewer, an occasional essayist, and the author of three unsuccessful novels into a political commentator worth reading.