ABSTRACT
A prophet is also usually thought of as a man who not only predicts the future but passes on a divine revelation of Truth to the people. George Orwell possesses "the prophetic vision". The most comprehensive defense of Orwell as a gifted technocratic prophet has been advanced by a contributor to The Futurist, a popular magazine. General characterizations of Orwell as a prophet and secondary watchwords—like "clairvoyant" and "forecaster"—were important for building his reputation as a prophet throughout the 1950s. In "The Prevention of Literature," he cast himself as a reincarnated Old Testament. The sentiments voiced in Grass's credo do indeed fit with the memory of another Orwell admirer, Swiss-born and German-speaking T. R. Fyvel, the Tribune friend who persuaded Orwell to write The Lion and the Unicorn and whose reception history of Orwell. As Cold War tensions cooled, commentators in the mid-'60s began to play up a "Halfway to 1984" theme.
