Down and Out in Paris and London

George Orwell''s vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, "Down and Out in Paris and London" is a moving tour of the underworld of society from the author of "1984", published with an introduction by Dervla Murphy in "Penguin Modern Classics". ''You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.'' Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his ''first contact with poverty''. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris'' vile ''Hotel X'', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time - and in doing so, found his voice as a writer. Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen-name, George Orwell, was born in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. An author and journalist, Orwell was one of the most prominent and influential figures in twentieth-century literature.