Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living

In 'Reflections on Gandhi', published in January 1949, in which he modified the strictures made in a previous review, Orwell wrote, 'our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have'. While a patient at the Cotswold Sanatorium, Cranham, he read the proofs of Ninete [...]
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In 'Reflections on Gandhi', published in January 1949, in which he modified the strictures made in a previous review, Orwell wrote, 'our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have'. While a patient at the Cotswold Sanatorium, Cranham, he read the proofs of Nineteen Eighty-Four and wrote five reviews. He began, but did not finish, an article on Evelyn Waugh, made notes for an essay on Conrad, and sketched out a long short-story, 'A Smoking-Room Story'. The volume includes many unpublished letters, Warburg's report on his visit to Cranham, a clarification of Orwell's public statement on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a detailed examination, with all the relevant correspondence, of Orwell's relationship with the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office. Two of the last items are a cheerful letter from Nancy Parratt, one of his BBC secretaries, and a letter from Sonia Orwell (whom Orwell had married a few weeks after he was transferred to University College Hospital, London). The volume concludes with a series of appendices.These print all work in progress; a statement of Orwell's accounts; a list of the 144 books he read in 1949; Orwell's will and final instructions for his literary executors; the names in his address book; those he considered cryptos or fellow-travellers; a list of books he owned and another of his pamphlet collection