This groundbreaking volume,never before published in the United States, at last introduces the interiorlife of George Orwell, the writer who defined twentieth-century politicalthought. Written as individual books throughout his career, the elevensurviving diaries collected here record Orwell’s youthful travels among minersand itinerant laborers, the fearsome rise of totalitarianism, the horrificdrama of World War II, and the feverish composition of his great masterpieces <em>Animal Farm</em> and <em>1984</em> (which have now sold morecopies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author). Personalentries cover the tragic death of his first wife and Orwell’s owndecline as he battled tuberculosis.Exhibiting great brilliance of prose and composition, these treasureddispatches, edited by the world’s leading Orwell scholar, exhibit “the seeds offamous passages to come” (<em>New Statesman</em>) and amount to a volume as penetrating as theautobiography he would never write.