Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938) is Orwell's memoir of his months fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Arriving in Barcelona in December 1936, he joined the POUM militia and fought on the Aragon front before being shot through the throat by a sniper. The book's second half describes the Communist suppression of the POUM and Orwell's narrow escape from arrest — experiences that shaped his lifelong hatred of totalitarianism and directly informed Animal Farm and 1984.