Literature is our shared heritage. Books and authors do not belong to anyone in particular — they are free to be read, enjoyed, and interpreted by all. Nevertheless, every avid reader knows what it feels like to stake a claim on a work or body of literature, then writhe at its misappropriation or misuse. For the Left, few authors inspire this response as much as George Orwell, a self-professed democratic socialist whose books are routinely used to undermine the political vision he quite literally fought for.

To be on the Left and to love Orwell means enduring opportunistic attempts to commandeer his work for reactionary purposes. For the past seventy-five years, the Right has enjoyed robbing the grave of one of the Left’s great artists. But it’s hard to greet the news, for example, that Orwell has turned up on reading lists compiled by Ben Shapiro and Prager University without indignation.

Of course, Orwell is by no means an uncontroversial figure among socialists. His opposition to Stalinism was commendable, but shortly before he died, he went so far as to create a list for Britain’s Information Research Department of writers and cultural figures he viewed as too soft on communism to warrant employment in the agency. Still, that same year Orwell himself lay on his deathbed writing to American publications to defend his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-four, from its hijacking by budding Cold Warriors who were reading it as an attack on socialist ideas. Had Orwell lived past the age of forty-six, one can imagine that his stout defense of the novel, and his ongoing and ironclad commitment to democratic socialism, might have reshaped his legacy.