No
bomb that ever burst, Shatters the crystal spirit.
The
Crystal Spirit is a revealing
look at the great writer and political thinker George
Orwell, whose visionary work gave us the great
anti-utopias of twentieth-century literature. Perhaps
best known for his enormously successful novel, Nineteen
Eighty-Four, and for that other
classic work of fiction, Animal
Farm, Orwell's reputation rests
as much upon his work as a critic of literature, of
manners, of politics--in a word, of life. His candor,
his penetration, his intellectual honesty, and his
mastery of the plain style raised to the level of
literature, account for his exceptional influence
during his lifetime and up to the present day.
A
close friend and colleague during the last decade of
that remarkable writer's life, Woodcock was thereby
uniquely qualified to delve into the complex personal
history of the man. Interwoven with his own memories,
the letters which Orwell wrote to him, and the
published and unpublished recollections of other
people who knew him, all against the political and
literary background of Orwell's work, this
ground-breaking intellectual biography is a general
critique that brilliantly traces the evolution of an
original writer in his most productive years, and
provides a sympathetic and penetrating analysis of
his work. First published in 1966, it was awarded
Canada's highest literary prize, the Governor
General's Award for Literary Merit.
"Like
Orwell, Woodcock is fair-minded, warm-hearted and
sensitive; his book, The Crystal Spirit, is the best
criticism of Orwell's corpus that I have read. "
--The Sunday Times,
London
George Woodcock
(1912-1995)--poet, author, essayist and widely known
as a literary journalist and historian--published
more than 90 titles on history, biography,
philosophy, poetry and literary criticism.
366
pages, 6x9, bibliography, index
Paperback ISBN: 1-55164-268-9 $24.99
Hardcover ISBN: 1-55164-269-7 $53.99
Table of
Contents
Biography
May
2005
