Communism and the Working Class

Abstract

In 1940, George Orwell wrote a profile of the novelist Henry Miller, praising him as a prose-stylist and psychologist of the ‘ordinary man’, praising him above all as a ‘creative writer’ in what has ceased to be ‘a writer’s world’. For ‘what is quite obviously happening’, Orwell declared, ‘is the break-up of laissez faire capitalism’, ‘the destruction of liberalism’ and of ‘literature as we know it’. In this end-times scenario, Miller is shown clinging to the ‘melting iceberg’ of liberal humanism, elaborating his own ‘subjective truth’ in his own inimitable style, indifferent to the world. As a foil, Orwell introduces the communist ‘propagandists’ and ‘cocksure partisans’ of the next generation.

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