Buy new:
$12.59
FREE delivery: Monday, April 22 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com
Sold by: Amazon.com
List Price: $16.99 Details

The List Price is the suggested retail price of a new product as provided by a manufacturer, supplier, or seller. Except for books, Amazon will display a List Price if the product was purchased by customers on Amazon or offered by other retailers at or above the List Price in at least the past 90 days. List prices may not necessarily reflect the product's prevailing market price.
Learn more
Save: $4.40 (26%)
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
FREE delivery Monday, April 22 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or fastest delivery Thursday, April 18. Order within 17 hrs 5 mins
In Stock
$$12.59 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$12.59
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
Amazon.com
Ships from
Amazon.com
Sold by
Amazon.com
Sold by
Amazon.com
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Payment
Secure transaction
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
FREE delivery April 22 - 29. Details
Or fastest delivery April 18 - 23. Details
Condition: Used: Acceptable
Comment: An acceptable and readable copy. All pages are intact, and the spine and cover are also intact. This item may have light highlighting, writing or underlining through out the book, curled corners, missing dust jacket and or stickers.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

All Art Is Propaganda Paperback – October 14, 2009

4.6 out of 5 stars 286

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$12.59","priceAmount":12.59,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"12","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"59","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"lA%2FeJDkh8Nu400XRahApLV6eJffHUAmxcyVrbAC%2Fy4MFTQ3LD2gyse2mJLvG5hPJNT0MjrMgckksYAXQYivfHlzPPxH69bkYgYLAYePNolAWloLZ3ySGDlCCCwRGJ0nUjsH86qJK9G8%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$7.42","priceAmount":7.42,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"7","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"42","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"lA%2FeJDkh8Nu400XRahApLV6eJffHUAmx7sFCVHwMGIrVGnUi4VEJZiiBpE%2BgI7eFkzjICHR3FKZj6NgTxuFs0vx0Y%2Bh0QCt4XYW%2FwtsRXrkXUifL8L%2Bf%2FiImu954PyRz5NcTSX9VxG30GRmUyGgfgUubTsT0FEWt1I9zg6pEUCrbyYjlh1muRA%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

The essential collection of critical essays from a twentieth-century master and author of 1984.

As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low.

A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead.

All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary.

With masterpieces such as "Politics and the English Language" and "Rudyard Kipling" and gems such as "Good Bad Books," here is an unrivaled education in, as George Packer puts it, "how to be interesting, line after line."

With an Introduction from Keith Gessen.

The Amazon Book Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.

Frequently bought together

$12.59
Get it as soon as Monday, Apr 22
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
+
$15.95
Get it as soon as Monday, Apr 22
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
+
$12.29
Get it as soon as Monday, Apr 22
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Total price:
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Details
Added to Cart
Choose items to buy together.
Popular Highlights in this book

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

The essential collection of critical essays from a 20th-century master As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead.

All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary. With masterpieces such as "Politics and the English Language" and "Rudyard Kipling" and gems such as "Good Bad Books," here is an unrivaled education in, as George Packer puts it, "how to be interesting, line after line." 

"Reaffirm[s] the author's status as one of the definitive essayists in English literature."--Los Angeles Times GEORGE ORWELL (1903?1950) served with the Imperial Police in Burma, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and was a member of the Home Guard and a writer for the BBC during World War II. He is the author of many works of nonfiction and fiction.

GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.

KEITH GESSEN was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men.

Also in this series: Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

About the Author

George Orwell (1903–1950), the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. He was born in India and educated at Eton. After service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he returned to Europe to earn his living by writing. An author and journalist, Orwell was one of the most prominent and influential figures in twentieth-century literature. His unique political allegory Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with the dystopia of 1984 (1949), which brought him worldwide fame. 



Keith Gessen was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of
n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent, The Nation, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics; First Edition (October 14, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 374 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0156033070
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0156033077
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 14 years and up
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1300L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.86 x 5.36 x 0.99 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 out of 5 stars 286

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
George Orwell
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

George Orwell is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators. Among his works are the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was also a prolific essayist, and it is for these works that he was perhaps best known during his lifetime. They include Why I Write and Politics and the English Language. His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there.

At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.

It was around this time that Orwell's unique political allegory Animal Farm (1945) was published. The novel is recognised as a classic of modern political satire and is simultaneously an engaging story and convincing allegory. It was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which finally brought him world-wide fame. Nineteen Eighty-Four's ominous depiction of a repressive, totalitarian regime shocked contemporary readers, but ensures that the book remains perhaps the preeminent dystopian novel of modern literature.

Orwell's fiercely moral writing has consistently struck a chord with each passing generation. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. Added to this, his ability to construct elaborately imaginative fictional worlds, which he imbued with this acute sense of morality, has undoubtedly assured his contemporary and future relevance.

George Orwell died in London in January 1950.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
286 global ratings
HOW DID THIS PASS THROUGH QUALITY CONTROL!!!!!
1 Star
HOW DID THIS PASS THROUGH QUALITY CONTROL!!!!!
do not buy a physical print from here. HOW DID THIS PASS THROUGH QUALITY CONTROL!!!!! I am so disappointed in the physical book i received. i have no idea how they managed to mess up this print! everything is crooked and the book is cut into a trapezoid shape which makes no sense! I was so looking forward to start reading this book but now i have to wait until i return this one and try to find a better print elsewhere.
Thank you for your feedback
Sorry, there was an error
Sorry we couldn't load the review

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2013
This collection of essays by George Orwell is part of a two-volume compilation. (The other volume is called Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays.) In a foreword to this volume, George Packer explains that the focus of All Art Is Propaganda is Orwell’s use of the essay genre as a means of holding something up for critical scrutiny. The theme of the volume, art as propaganda or as a tool for persuasion, recurs throughout these essays. We often think of propaganda in its perjorative sense; something used by the powerful to cajole the unthinking masses into actions that they would not normally undertake on their own. But for Orwell, "propaganda" is a neutral term. Any writing or other art that attempts to persuade, for good or ill, is propaganda.

Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens introduces this theme: “But every writer, especially every novelist, has a ‘message,’ whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.” (p. 47) That the Dickens message is not always clear is illustrated by the fact that people of many conflicting political leanings have, as Orwell puts it, “stolen” Dickens. Both Marxists and Catholics have latched onto him as a spokesman. This essay seeks to understand the real Dickens.
Some other literary heavyweights get a thorough Orwell examination in ths volume: Henry Miller, Shakespeare, Kipling, T.S. Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy is known to have rejected Shakespeare as not even “an average author.” Orwell finds the root of Tolstoy’s displeasure with the Bard to be “the quarrel between the religious and the humanist attitudes toward life.” (p. 326) He sees in Tolstoy a writer whose religious orthodoxy makes it impossible to appreciate the sensuality and joy in living that we find in Shakespeare.

But Orwell’s critical eye is not only focused on the literary greats. “Boys’ Weeklies” takes a look at the amazing popularity of twopenny weeklies aimed a boys (sometimes called “penny dreadfuls”). These too, he finds, have a propagandistic motive. It is a motive more sinister than one might have suspected until you look into who owned and published these weeklies.

In “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” Orwell examines another popular genre: crime fiction. He decries their “vulgarisation of ideas,” “fearful intellectual sadism,” and “power-worship,” and he wonders what these trends say about British society.

Orwell does not limit himself to the art of writing. In “The Art of Donald McGill,” he examines the post card drawings of this popular artist. He looks at the obscenity of the post cards and wonders what it says about marriage and the stability of society. “Benefit of Clergy” is an analysis of the work of Salvador Dali. He sees in Dali’s work “a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency,” and concludes that “a society in which they [artists like Dali] can flourish has something wrong with it” (p. 215).

Walt Whitman, Charlie Chaplin, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gulliver’s Travels, the Catholic Church, Soviet Russia, Gandhi, H. G. Wells, Hitler, Voltaire, Graham Greene, India and British colonialism, fascism, communism, and democracy, and, of course, boys’ magazines and detective stories. Orwell’s range of topics is seemingly endless. He was a man who hated orthodoxy and cant, who thought deeply about the act of writing and how the written word affected people, and who then wrote about all these things clearly, simply, and powerfully.
38 people found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2010
This title is a companion volume to one titled  Facing Unpleasant Facts . That volume dealt with many of the famous narrative essays produced in Orwell's career, whereas this one has selections of what the editor calls `Critical Essays". Both are highly valuable as source material for those interested in Orwell. In fact, I believe that he was a far better essayist and first-person writer than he ever was a novelist.

The books that his legacy stands on for most readers are good, but in his essays we can see him explore the ideas that lead to the creation of both 
Nineteen Eighty-Four  and  Animal Farm: Centennial Edition . In fact, both the essays "Politics and the English Language" and "The Prevention of Literature" could be easily attached as appendices to those books (both essays are in the present volume).

The only practical issue with this book is that many of the essays are more of the literary criticism approach or movie reviews (even if he would hate that characterization). If you do not have a familiarity with the source material that he is reviewing, you might seem out of sorts. In essays on both the careers of Dickens and Tolstoy I felt a disconnect because it taxed my limited familiarity with those authors.

The interesting thing about Orwell's writing is that the prerequisite knowledge is not really necessary. He uses the essay form to great strength, using what he is often ostensibly writing about as a launching point to talk about the world at large. In this sense, I kept thinking that on many levels his work is some of the first that could really be at home in a cultural studies department. I then realized that his writing voice precludes that. His work is and his voice is a plain, clear English that he advocated and is free of jargon. As smart as Orwell is, his writing feels like a conversation with an interesting and clever friend, which must be why I keep going back to his
9 people found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2011
The title of this collection of Orwell's essays is taken from the initial entry discussing Charles Dickens and it is a well chosen title. The inability of artists to be completely apolitical is the theme that holds this anthology together as Orwell examines topics ranging from the art of Salvador Dali, to Swift's Gulliver's Travels to Graham Greene. The fact that Orwell left England to risk in life in the Spanish Civil War fighting for the republican forces only to memorialize his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, puts him in a unique position to examine the intersection of art and politics.

The acerbic wit and ranging intelligence of Orwell is on full display in this pages. In addition, his rabid fear and hate of totalitarianism that has made him a touchstone for intellectuals both left and right is also apparent in his lucid analysis of Gulliver's travels and the supposed "utopia" of the Houyhnhnms. Some of these essays are familiar, such as Politics and the English Language but others are more obscure, such as Benefits of the Clergy: Some Notes on Salavdor Dali which was censored for obscenity in 1946. My particular favorite is Confessions of a Book Reviewer, which lacks the strong political overtones of his other essays but gives a vivid image into the overlooked aspect of Orwell's life as a workaday journalist and book reviewer.

Despite not living to see the Cold War or the rise of religious fanaticism his thoughts and words still matter. For those who are unfamiliar with Orwell outside 1984 or Animal Farm, All Art is Propaganda provides a great starting point into the writings of one of the great political writers of the modern era.
29 people found this helpful
Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
Michael
5.0 out of 5 stars klarsichtig und auf den Punkt
Reviewed in Germany on September 5, 2021
Orwell ist king! er sieht die Dinge vor seiner Zeit, auch stilistisch heute noch vorbildlich. Packers Intro ist wohltuend ausgewogen, er lobt Orwell nicht nur, sondern gibt den kritischen Einordner. Good Bad Books sticht für mich heraus, aber alle Essays haben ihren grossen Wert. Super Lektüre für kritische Geister.
Marcelo Alves Araujo
3.0 out of 5 stars Conjunto de textos de Orwell
Reviewed in Brazil on May 13, 2015
Não é o melhor livro dele, e muitas vezes a análise aprofundada de certos textos se torna massante se você não os conhece.
Um ponto bem interessante é perceber a evolução política do escritor, saindo de um defensor ferrenho do comunismo, para um dos maiores críticos do regime soviético, o que me levou a entender o de onde surgiu outras obras como 1984 e Animal Farm.
george wilkinson
3.0 out of 5 stars OK BOOK - NOTHING IS NEW - ESPECIALLY SPIN DOCTORS ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 7, 2014
OK BOOK - NOTHING IS NEW - ESPECIALLY SPIN DOCTORS IN POLITICS ESSAY - ORWELL SAW IT ALL AHEAD OF TIME