Novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1949
Opening lines
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Text quoted from gutenberg.net.au
Synopsis
An employee of the Ministry of Truth spends his days correcting yesterday's newspapers so that the Party has never been wrong. At home, in a recess the telescreen does not cover, he opens a notebook bought from a junk dealer and begins to write, which is enough to condemn him. A young woman from the fiction department follows him in the corridors; he believes she has been assigned to watch him, until the day she slips a note into his hand.
Context
The book was written at Barnhill, a farm on the Scottish island of Jura, without electricity. No typist having agreed to come that far, its author typed the final version himself, in bed, and collapsed shortly afterwards, before leaving the island in January 1949. He hesitated between this title and The Last Man in Europe; the publisher preferred the numbered title, and the manuscript shows that its author had also considered 1980 and 1982. In his reader's report, the publisher called it one of the most terrifying books he had read. The novel appeared in June 1949.
Who it is for
A novel in three parts followed by an appendix on Newspeak; translated into French as early as 1950, and retranslated several times since 2018.
Prizes and reception
Translated into at least sixty-five languages and sold in millions of copies; in France, ten new translations have appeared since 2018.
Sources for this page 14
The pages consulted to check this page.