Scenes from an Afterlife

In Scenes from an Afterlife, Rodden provides a masterful and wide-ranging account of the impact and appropriation of Orwell and his ideas since his death in 1950. Considered by different groups and at different times as a prophet, secular saint, model leftist, exemplary liberal, proto-neoconservative, or would-be Tory, among many other things, Orwell, "the Zelig of modern intellectuals," was a writer with whom virtually every intellectual movement of the late twentieth-century felt it must contend.