George Orwell (1903–1950)

Orwell's many and varied essays are indispensable and easily outclass his novels, in my estimation.

But the publising history is complex.

Two essay collections were published during Orwell's lifetime—Inside the Whale and Other Essays in 1940 and Critical Essays in 1946 (the latter published in the United States as Dickens, Dali, and Others in 1958.) His publisher followed up these anthologies with Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays in 1950, England Your England and Other Essays in 1953—which was revised as Such, Such Were the Joys—and Collected Essays in 1961.

Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus edited a four volume collection of Orwell's writings, first published in 1968 by Secker & Warburg, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, divided into four volumes.

Shortly thereafter these volumes were published in paperback by Penguin. All now out of print.

The first significant publications in the United States were Doubleday's A Collection of Essays by George Orwell from 1954, 1956's The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Penguin's Selected Essays in 1957; re-released in 1962 with the title Inside the Whale and Other Essays and in abridged form as Why I Write in 2005 as a part of the Great Ideas series.

In the aforementioned series, Penguin also published the short collections Books v. Cigarettes (2008), Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (2010), and Decline of the English Murder (2009). The latter does not contain the same texts as Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays, published by Penguin in association with Secker & Warburg in 1965. The complete texts Orwell wrote for the Observer are collected in Orwell: The Observer Years published by Atlantic Books in 2003.

The Complete Works of George Orwell is a twenty-volume series, published in 1998 by Secker, with the first nine being devoted to the non-fiction books and novels and the final eleven volumes variously titled.

This is currently out of print.

In 2001 Penguin published four selections from The Complete Works of George Orwell edited by Peter Davison in their Modern Classics series.

In 2011, Davison's selection of letters and journal entries were published as George Orwell: A Life in Letters and Diaries by Harvill Secker.

A selection by Davison from Orwell's journalism and other writings was published by Harvill Secker in 2014 under the title Seeing Things as They Are.

Since the publication of Davison's corrected critical edition, John Carey's very thorough Essays was released on 15 October 2002, as a part of the Everyman's Library. George Packer edited two collections for Houghton Mifflin, released on 13 October 2008—All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays and Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays.

The John Carey selection (Essays) is well worth considering.

It is available in hardback on Amazon and offers an extremely generous selection of material. About maybe 200 selections.

I do not claim this survey as complete, but these do seem to be the major publications.

Taking into account what is no longer in print I definitiely would go for the John Carey.

The original 4 Volume set by Secker & Warburg is available 2nd hand, but it will cost you a small fortune. I have seen it for sale for $600 or more.… (more)

This book is great, but often misinterpreted. I think any thoughts I have on it are really preempted well by Pynchon's foreword:

"Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same... specific predictions are only details, after all. What is perhaps more important, indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own- the corruption of the spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power, were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the third Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour Party- like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?"… (more)