There is no better model for a nonfiction writer than Orwell, who expressed what he thought as honestly as he could and in the clearest possible way. Though I was publishing two art biographies with Harcourt at the time, they foolishly rejected my idea and I brought out my essay in the Kenyon Review. I showed how Orwell influenced the concepts and methods of American participatory journalism; compared his views on style to those of Hobbes and Swift; and argued that his clear style was closely related to his moral integrity. I While our country is bitterly divided by radically opposing views on domestic and foreign policy and we are engaged in an increasingly costly and risky far-off war, we had to vote in a presidential election in which neither candidate inspired hope or confidence. In London during the Second World War, when the propaganda war at home raged in concert with the war against Hitler, Orwell felt as many of us feel now. In his “War Diary” of April 27, 1942, he recorded: “We are all drowning in filth.
