Homage to Catalonia
Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republic, was shot through the throat by a sniper, and witnessed the Communist Party's betrayal of the revolution from the inside. His furious, honest account of the Spanish Civil War (the idealism, the betrayal, the bureaucracy of oppression) is the first draft of everything he wrote afterwards.
The two chapters explaining the Spanish left's factions are dry enough that Orwell apologises for them in the text and later editions moved them to appendices at his own request; “more than seventy-five years later, such a precise accounting is indeed unnecessary.” The Aragon trenches are slow, and “his extensive detailing of trench life is repetitive and largely uneventful.” Readers note a “maddening inconsistency of the narrative,” and his own wife appears as “this nameless, shapeless figure” despite being present for events the book describes. Historians argue it overweights Communist betrayal, calling it “misleading about the events of the war,” and readers warn “I wouldn't recommend it for an overview of the Spanish Civil War.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
