"[1] His non-fiction cultural and political criticism constitutes the majority of his work, but Orwell also wrote in several genres of fictional literature.

He first achieved widespread acclaim with his fictional novella Animal Farm and cemented his place in history with the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four shortly before his death.

While fiction accounts for a small fraction of his total output, these two novels are his best-selling works, having sold almost fifty million copies in sixty-two languages by 2007—more than any other pair of books by a twentieth-century author.

In his lifetime he published hundreds of articles including several regular columns in British newsweeklies related to literary and cultural criticism as well as his explicitly political writing.

In addition he wrote book-length investigations of poverty in Britain in the form of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier and one of the first retrospectives on the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia.

Between 1941 and 1946 he also wrote fifteen "London Letters" for the American political and literary quarterly Partisan Review, the first of which appeared in the issue dated March–April 1941.

The impact of Orwell's large corpus is manifested in additions to the Western canon such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, its subjection to continued public notice and scholarly analyses, and the changes to vernacular English it has effected—notably the adoption of "Orwellian" as a description of totalitarian societies.

Orwell wrote six novels: Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Peter Davison of De Montfort University spent 17 years researching and correcting the entirety of Orwell's works[5] with Angus and Sheila Davison, and devoted the last eleven volumes of the twenty-volume series The Complete Works of George Orwell to essays, letters, and journal entries.

While working for the BBC, he collected six editions of a poetry magazine named Voice which were broadcast by Orwell, Mulk Raj Anand, John Atkins, Edmund Blunden, Venu Chitale, William Empson, Vida Hope, Godfrey Kenton, Una Marson, Herbert Read, and Stephen Spender.

In the aforementioned series, Penguin also published the short collections Books v. Cigarettes (2008), Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (2010), and Decline of the English Murder (2009).

Orwell was responsible for producing The Indian Section of BBC Eastern Service and his program notes from 1 February and 7 December 1942 have survived (they are reproduced in War Broadcasts).

There are also times when Davison seems in too big a hurry to add a hitherto neglected item to the canon, such as his inclusion of an essay titled: "Can socialists be happy?"

But it is also just about the worst piece of writing in this entire edition, studded with the sort of wooden, thesis-driven paragraphs you might expect from a class in freshman composition.

[35]George Orwell's payment book for 20 December 1943, records the sum of pounds 5.50 for a special article of 2,000 words for Tribune [...].