Editing George Orwell (section)

===Literary influences===
In an autobiographical piece that Orwell sent to the editors of ''Twentieth Century Authors'' in 1940, he wrote: <blockquote>The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]], [[Jonathan Swift|Swift]], [[Henry Fielding|Fielding]], [[Charles Dickens|Dickens]], [[Charles Reade]], [[Gustave Flaubert|Flaubert]] and, among modern writers, [[James Joyce]], [[T. S. Eliot]] and [[D. H. Lawrence]]. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is [[W. Somerset Maugham]], whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.<ref>{{cite book |title=Writers: Their Lives and Works |date=2018 |publisher=Dorling Kindersley Ltd |page=245}}</ref></blockquote> Elsewhere, Orwell strongly praised the works of [[Jack London]], especially his book ''[[The Road (London book)|The Road]]''. Orwell's investigation of poverty in ''The Road to Wigan Pier'' strongly resembles that of Jack London's ''[[The People of the Abyss]]'', in which the American journalist disguises himself as an out-of-work sailor to investigate the lives of the poor in London. In his essay "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946) Orwell wrote: "If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put ''[[Gulliver's Travels]]'' among them." On [[H. G. Wells]] he wrote, "The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Sperber |first1=Murray A. |title=The Author as Cultural Hero: H. G. Wells and George Orwell |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780682 |publisher=University of Manitoba |date=1981|jstor=24780682 }}</ref>

Orwell was an admirer of [[Arthur Koestler]] and became a close friend during the three years that Koestler and his wife Mamain spent at the cottage of Bwlch Ocyn in the [[Vale of Ffestiniog]]. Orwell reviewed Koestler's ''[[Darkness at Noon]]'' for the ''[[New Statesman]]'' in 1941, saying:
{{blockquote|
Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant literature, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow "confessions" by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods. What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened—for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society—but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.walesartsreview.org/to-the-detriment-of-us-all-the-untouched-legacy-of-arthur-koestler-and-george-orwell/|title=The Untouched Legacy of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell|date=24 February 2016|access-date=2 September 2017}}</ref>
}}

Other writers Orwell admired included [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]], [[George Gissing]], [[Graham Greene]], [[Herman Melville]], [[Henry Miller]], [[Tobias Smollett]], [[Mark Twain]], [[Joseph Conrad]], and [[Yevgeny Zamyatin]].<ref>''Letter to Gleb Struve, 17 February 1944'', Orwell: Essays, Journalism and Letters Vol 3, eds. Sonia Brownell and Ian Angus</ref> He was both an admirer and a critic of [[Rudyard Kipling]],<ref>{{cite web|url=http://orwell.ru/library/novels/Burmese_Days/english/e_mm_int |title=Malcolm Muggeridge: Introduction |access-date=23 December 2008}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/2939606.html |title=Does Orwell Matter? |access-date=23 December 2008 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080705141429/http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/2939606.html |archive-date=5 July 2008 }}</ref> praising Kipling as a gifted writer and a "good bad poet" whose work is "spurious" and "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting," but undeniably seductive and able to speak to certain aspects of reality more effectively than more enlightened authors.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip |title=George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling |access-date=23 December 2008}}</ref> He had a similarly ambivalent attitude to [[G. K. Chesterton]], whom he regarded as a writer of considerable talent who had chosen to devote himself to "Roman Catholic propaganda",<ref>''[[Notes on Nationalism]]''</ref> and to [[Evelyn Waugh]], who was, he wrote, "about as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions".<ref>''Orwell: Essays, Journalism and Letters'' Vol 4, eds. Sonia Brownell and Ian Angus, p. 576</ref>