ABSTRACT
In the early and mid-1980s, the author interviewed and corresponded with several of George Orwell's old friends and colleagues and with prominent American and British intellectuals active in the early postwar years who had responded strongly to his work. As 1984 approached, profiles and documentaries about Orwell dominated intellectual magazines, press headlines, and cultural airwaves. Orwell seemed ubiquitous. Indeed Nineteen Eighty-Four had managed the spectacular and unprecedented feat of topping the fiction bestseller lists for several weeks in late 1983 and early 1984—an amazing thirty-five years after its original publication in June 1949. In the wake of 1984, it was clear that Orwell had indisputably become the most influential political writer of the century. Empirically grounded in the historical materials of Orwell's reception, such a rhetoric would posit concepts that could illuminate the development and transformations of his own reputation.
