The Modern Scholar: World of George Orwell

Big Brother Is Watching You: The words are inextricably associated with the classic dystopian novel 1984 and with its revered author, George Orwell. The Modern Scholar series continues its exploration of great authors with this course from esteemed professor Michael Shelden. In these lectures Orwell, who also penned the epitome of the political satire, Animal Farm, is discussed in full, from his childhood in Henley-on-Thames to his final days.

Course Syllabus

Lecture 1 An English Schoolboy, 1903-1922

Lecture 2 Servant of the Empire, 1922-1927

Lecture 3 Among the Poor, 1927-1933

Lecture 4 Young Novelist, 1933-1935

Lecture 5 A Window on Wigan, 1935-1936

Lecture 6 The War in Spain, 1937

Lecture 7 Bearing Witness, 1937-1938

Lecture 8 Coming Up for Air, 1938-1939

Lecture 9 Surviving the Blitz, 1940-1941

Lecture 10 A Voice on the BBC, 1941-1943

Lecture 11 Animal Farm,1944-1945

Lecture 12 Last Man in Europe, 1945-1946

Lecture 13 Orwell's List, 1946-1947

Lecture 14 Big Brother and the World, 1948-1950


Born in Oklahoma, Shelden earned his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University in 1979. He then began teaching at nearby Indiana State University, where he was promoted to professor of English in 1989, and where he remains a full-time member of the faculty. For ten years he was a fiction critic for the Baltimore Sun, and from 1995 to 2007 he was a features writer for the Daily Telegraph of London, where he contributed dozens of articles on notable figures in film, literature, and music, including one of the last interviews with actor Christopher Reeve. Shelden is married and the father of two daughters.

Shelden’s first book George Orwell: Ten Animal Farm Letters to His Agent, Leonard Moore (1984), was an edited collection drawn from letters Shelden found at the Lilly Library (Indiana University, Bloomington) and was the first to publicize. In 1989, he published his literary history Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon, which covered the decade of the 1940s when Horizon was the most influential literary magazine in the United Kingdom. The book was based on a large collection of Connolly’s personal papers at the University of Tulsa, and on interviews with the magazine’s former editors and assistants, including Stephen Spender.

Authorized by the George Orwell estate, Shelden’s biography of Orwell (Orwell: The Authorized Biography) was published in 1991 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Among other things, the book included the first detailed account of Orwell’s controversial list of people whom he considered politically dishonest and unreliable in British society.

Shelden’s biography of Graham Greene appeared in a United Kingdom edition in 1994 under the title Graham Greene: The Man Within. In 1995 it was published in the United States, with revisions, as Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. Its “despoiling” portrait of Greene as a driven and devious artist provoked heated debate on both sides of the Atlantic. In the New York Review of Books there was an especially spirited debate between Shelden and novelist David Lodge on the question of Greene’s anti-Semitism, with Shelden arguing that Greene’s published remarks about Jews are “worse than anything in T.S. Eliot or Evelyn Waugh,” and Lodge countering that although Greene drew “on social and cultural prejudices and stereotypes concerning Jews which were common in English society before World War II . . . to label it as anti-Semitic ridicule is crudely reductive.