Down and Out in Paris and London (Essential Penguin)

by George Orwell (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $3.47

  This is Orwell's record of a period in the late Twenties when he lived among the tramps, dregs and plongeurs of London and Paris. 'It is the white-hot reaction of a sensitive observant, compassionate young man to poverty, injustice and the callousness of the rich ...It offers insights rather than solutions; but always insights have to precede solutions ...No one has ever claimed Down and Out is its author's best book, yet many of his admirers describe it as their favourite Orwell. Its flaws are numerous, but oddly endearing'.

• Used

  Paperback
  1989

  $3.84

• New

  Paperback
  2001

  $11.74

  George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society. 'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.' Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his 'first contact with poverty'. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris' vile 'Hotel X', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time - and in doing so, found his voice as a writer.