Why I Write

Orwell's 1946 essay, often treated as the canonical writer's credo. He traces his own arc from a lonely boyhood spent making up stories, through the Burmese police, poverty in Paris and London, and the Spanish Civil War — which he says "tipped the scale" and made his political purpose clear — to the four motives he says drive every serious writer: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. The line he wants on the page: "What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice."