Just curious here, what do people here think of George Orwell?

[Starry Messenger]

25. George Orwell Fills Informer Role Of Big Brother

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19980701&slug=2758972

1998

"LONDON - In "1984," George Orwell's bleak fantasy of life in a nightmarish authoritarian world, Big Brother is everywhere and denunciations are the stuff of everyday life. The state monitors ordinary homes. Children inform on their parents, and parents on their colleagues. Privacy is banned.

In an era of clashing ideologies, Orwell's terrifying depiction of the ways an all-powerful state could destroy individual human dignity, published in 1949, won him fame as an opponent of totalitarianism.

But Orwell wasn't above a little informing himself. A stupefied Britain learned two years ago that the author had denounced "crypto-communist" writers and academics in the West to the government. Now the names are coming out.

This week, many of the British and American literary and establishment figures who are featured on his list of suspects will be identified for the first time in a new complete edition of his work, to be published tomorrow by Secker & Warburg. The edition isn't being published by a U.S. outlet but is being distributed in the States by Secker, says the publisher.

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Orwell said: "At the same time, it isn't a bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed." He included the most openly leftist of British intellectuals, including writers George Bernard Shaw and J.B. Priestley, actor Charlie Chaplin, singer Paul Robeson, filmmaker Orson Welles and novelist John Steinbeck - whom he excoriated as a "spurious writer" and "pseudo-naif."