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The Crystal Spirit is a revealing look at the great writer and political thinker George Orwell, whose visionary work gave us the great anti-utopias of twentieth-century literature. Perhaps best known for his enormously successful novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and for that other classic work of fiction, Animal Farm, Orwell's reputation rests as much upon his work as a critic of literature, of manners, of politics-in a word, of life. His candor, his penetration, his intellectual honesty, and his mastery of the plain style raised to the level of literature, account for his exceptional influence during his lifetime and up to the present day. A close friend and colleague during the last decade of that remarkable writer's life, Woodcock was thereby uniquely qualified to delve into the complex personal history of the man. Interwoven with his own memories, the letters which Orwell wrote to him, and the published and unpublished recollections of other people who knew him, all against the political and literary background of Orwell's work, this ground-breaking intellectual biography is a general critique that brilliantly traces the evolution of an original writer in his most productive years, and provides a sympathetic and penetrating analysis of his work. First published in 1966, The Crystal Spirit was awarded Canada's highest literary prize, the Governor General's Award for Literary Merit.