National Review Top Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Century. “One of Orwell’s very best books and perhaps the best book that exists on the Spanish Civil War.”—The New Yorker
In 1936, originally intending merely to report on the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, George Orwell found himself embroiled as a participant—as a member of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity. Fighting against the Fascists, Orwell’s account of life in the trenches—with a “democratic army” composed of men with no ranks, no titles, and often no weapons—and of his near fatal wounding, is painfully vivid and occasionally comic. As the politics became tangled, Orwell was pulled into a heartbreaking conflict between his own personal ideals and the complicated realities of political power struggles.

Considered one of the finest works by a man V. S. Pritchett called “the wintry conscience of a generation,” Homage to Catalonia is both Orwell’s memoir of his experiences at the front and his tribute to those who died in what he called a fight for common decency.

With an introduction by Lionel Trilling, and a new foreword by Adam Hochschild.