1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four (commonly written as 1984) is a dystopian novel by the English writer George Orwell, published in 1949. The book tells the story of Winston Smith and his degradation by the totalitarian state in which he lives. more...

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Along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, it is among the most famous and cited dystopias in literature.

It has been translated into 62 languages and has left a profound impression upon the English language itself. Nineteen Eighty-Four, its terminology and its author have become bywords when discussing privacy and state-security issues. The term \"Orwellian\" has come to describe actions or organizations reminiscent of the totalitarian society depicted in the novel.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has, at times, been seen as revolutionary and politically dangerous and therefore was banned by many libraries in various countries, not mentioning totalitarian regimes.

Novel history

Published on June 8, 1949 by Secker and Warburg, the bulk of the novel was written by Orwell on the island of Jura, Scotland in 1948, although he had been writing it since 1945. It begins on April 4, 1984 at 13:00 (\"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen…\").

As a dystopia, it was preceded by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 novel We, which Orwell was familiar with, having read it in French and reviewed it in 1946; it became a significant influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell also obsessively re-read Katharine Burdekin's 1937 dystopia, Swastika Night, borrowing from it the theme of a future fascist State where all \"true\" past history has been erased except for isolated fragments kept in secret, forbidden books.

Title

Originally Orwell titled the book The Last Man in Europe, but his publisher, Frederic Warburg, suggested a change to assist in the book's marketing. Orwell did not object to this suggestion. The reasons for selection of this particular year are not known. Orwell may have only switched the last two digits of the year in which he wrote the book. Alternatively, he may have been alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, a socialist organization founded in 1884. The allusion may have also been to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which the power of a political movement reaches its height in 1984), to G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (also set in that year), or to a poem by his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, called \"End of the Century, 1984\". A final supposed explanation is that his original re-titling was to be 1980; however, with his illness the book was taking a long time to write, so he felt obliged to push the story further and further into the future.

Read more at Wikipedia.org