Description
In 1936 George Orwell went to Spain to report on the Civil War and instead joined the P.O.U.M. militia to fight against the Fascists. In this now justly famous account of his experience he describes the bleak and comic aspects of trench warfare on the Aragon front, the Barcelona uprising in May 1937, his nearly fatal wounding just two weeks later, and his escape from Barcelona into France after the P.O.U.M. was suppressed. As important as the story of the war itself is Orwell's uncompromising effort to sort out the partisan politics that plagued the Republican cause. His analysis of why the Communist Party sabotaged the workers' revolution and branded the P.O.U.M. as Trotskyist provides an essential key to the outcome of the war and an ironical sidelight on international communism.
It was during this period in Spain that Orwell learned for himself-he had come to distrust the journalism of his era-the nature of totalitarianism in practice, whether of the right or the left, an education that laid the ground- work for his great books Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
"Clear-eyed and unflinching.... at once history and a moral and imaginative experience. Thus the 'raw material' becomes no less a work of art than its fictional elaboration in '1984.'" -Bertram D. Wolfe, N.Y. Herald Tribune Book Review
"One of Orwell's very best books and perhaps the best book that exists on the Spanish Civil War."
-The New Yorker
ISBN:9780156421171
