Background

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is undoubtedly one of the best historical memoirs of the Spanish Civil War in any language. It is a brilliantly written personal account and superb piece of reportage of his experiences, accompanied, sentence after sentence, by acute and vivid observations, evoking through sights and often smells from the revolutionary euphoria he encountered in Barcelona to the everyday life, warts and all, of a militiaman on the Aragón front. The book is almost certainly the most widely read account of the Spanish Civil War in English and for many readers, knowledge of the war begins and ends with Orwell’s sharp though sometimes flawed political analysis, something he later more or less conceded in several magazine articles published in the 1940s which relatively few people have read. Orwell logically narrates the war from his own personal experiences of his arrival at the tail end of anarchist Barcelona, the events of May 1937 and one unremarkable front in Aragón, but the conflict was a far bigger and more complex one.

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