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Homage to Catalonia is a memoir and the sixth book by English writer George Orwell published in 1938, in which he accounts his personal experiences and observations while fighting in the Spanish Civil War.
Covering the period between December 1936 and June 1937, Orwell recounts Catalonia’s revolutionary fervor during his training in Barcelona, his boredom on the front lines in Aragon, his involvement in the interfactional May Days conflict back in Barcelona on leave, his getting shot in the throat back on the front lines, and his escape to France after the POUM was declared an illegal organization. The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write in 1946, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
Initial reception was mixed, often depending on whether the reviewers’ analyses of events aligned with Orwell’s. Praise was reserved for his vivid depiction of life on the frontlines, while criticisms were aimed at his denunciations of the Republican government and Communist Party. It received a second wave of popularity during the 1950s, after the popularity of Orwell’s novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) attracted a reevaluation of the book, with American liberal intellectuals presenting it as a work of anti-communism. During the 1960s, figures in the New Left again recontextualised it through the lens of revolutionary socialism, opposed both to Marxism-Leninism and capitalism, which attracted another wave of criticism from figures in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Since the Spanish transition to democracy, some historians have cautioned against reading Orwell’s first-person account as a representation of the conflict as a whole.