Sales of Orwell’s “1984” Soar in Response to Trump Presidency
On this day, less than a week after Donald Trump was inaugurated as President, sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 were reported to be soaring. Amazon listed the book as number one on its best-seller list. The publisher had ordered a new printing of 75,000 copies.
The interest in Orwell’s famous 1949 was attributed to the parallels between the totalitarian regime he described with policies of the new Trump administration. Orwell’s society of Big Brother was based on a policy of “newspeak” in which independent thought or unorthodox ideas were suppressed. Many people saw a parallel with the controversy of the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration, in which Trump himself angrily denied that it was as small as media accounts reported. Trump spokespersons characterized the administration’s view as based on “alternative facts.” This term led to a spike in web searches related to the word “facts.”
For the original publication of Orwell’s 1984, go to June 6, 1949. His short novel Animal Farm, which satirized totalitarian regimes of both the left and the right, was published on August 17, 1945.
Read the classic book for yourself: George Orwell, (1949, and many subsequent editions)v
Learn more about Orwell here
Read the insightful book: Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (2017)
And also read: D. J. Taylor, On Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019)