![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The fundamental premise of the novel was its most quickly outmoded feature-outmoded almost from the start. There was a bounce in readership in 1983-84-four million copies were sold that year-because, well, it was 1984. In the nineteen-seventies, it was used to comment on Nixon and Watergate. The postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe produced societies right out of Orwell’s pages, but American readers responded to “1984” as a book about loyalty oaths and McCarthyism. It was intended as a warning about tendencies within liberal democracies, and that is how it has been read. ![]() Partly it’s owing to the fact that, unlike “Darkness at Noon,” Orwell’s book was not intended as a book about life under Communism. “1984” is obviously a Cold War book, but the Cold War ended thirty years ago. It has outlasted in public awareness other contenders from its era, such as Aldous Huxley’s “ Brave New World” (1932), Ray Bradbury’s “ Fahrenheit 451” (1953), and Anthony Burgess’s “ A Clockwork Orange” (1962), not to mention two once well-known books to which it is indebted, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “ We” (1921) and Arthur Koestler’s “ Darkness at Noon” (1940). George Orwell’s “ 1984,” published seventy years ago today, has had an amazing run as a work of political prophecy. ![]()
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