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Editor's note: What's your favorite hook? That was one of about a dozen questions the 274 recipients of $500,000 in cumulative monetary awards from the Society last year were asked in a "get to know you " email survey. Excerpted responses formed the basis of brief profiles of the winners in the winter 2009 annual awards edition of this magazine. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Jane Austen s Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series all received multiple votes. George Orwell's 1984 topped those worthy reads. How come? Press deadlines prevented pursuing an answer until now. The following appreciation of the dystopian classic, first published in 1949. suggests some reasons.
Because George Orwell's 1984 is an existential horror story about a repressive totalitarian society, it is not in the technical sense an enjoyable read. Frederic Warburg, the publisher who recommended that his firm. Seeker and Warburg, produce this important yet disturbing work of art and social commentary, said, "I pray that I may be spared from reading another like it. ..." Scholar J. R. Hammond, in his George Orwell Companion, stated that "to read it is a painful experience," and, as such, an essential one. Even Orwell biographer Laurence Brander observed that "many cannot read it a second time."
Yet when 1984 arrived more than 50 years ago, poet and critic Sir Herbert Read raved in World Review that it was "the most terrifying warning that a man has ever uttered." Noted intellectual Diana Trilling wrote in The Nation that Orwell "has conceived the inconceivable." the complete extinction of freedom, creating a vital nightmare of a novel. And the redoubtable writer Mark Schorer's New York Times book review praised how "its horror is crushingly immediate."
Along with Animal Farm, another masterwork of revolution and tyranny by Orwell ( 1903-50), this apparently repulsive novel remains mandatory reading in secondary schools and higher education. Plus,...