“When I sit down to write a book,” Orwell confessed, “I do not say to myself: ‘I want to create a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact that I want to draw attention to…” This is how Orwell's four autobiographical stories, which make up this book, were written. “Down and Out in Paris and London” - about the underbelly of life in the glorious Paris, where he worked as a dishwasher in a hotel, and about the world of London tramps and beggars, among whom Orwell lived for three years, sleeping under bridges and in shelters for the homeless… “The Road to Wigan Pier” - about the north of England, a region that is simultaneously poetic and industrial, and about the hardships of miners, the working class, the “humiliated and insulted,” to whose suffering the socialist writer could not remain indifferent. Finally, “Homage to Catalonia” - perhaps one of his most scorching and honest texts - about the Spanish Civil War, where Orwell went to fight as a militiaman.
