From the third volume of George Woodcock's autobiography:

“Like many people who grew old and have not cast off from the past, I feel the urgency that makes me want to write even of the recent past before it is too late, and also, to see at times my life in panoramic recession. For I realize now, looking back over my eight completed decades, that from the days I left school in 1929 up to 1977, I was involved in institutions, or something very like institutions, and depended on them largely for my living. I began with the eleven years working for the Great Western Railway. When I left that in 1949, I involved myself for almost a decade in the anarchist movement, which, though apparently lightly structured and voluntary in its operations, in fact had the orthodoxies and the moral pressures that made it into an institution of its own kind. Like Orwell, I found that a writer cannot further his political ideals by immersing himself in an organized movement, but only as guerilla fighting in his own terrain.”

George Woodcock (1912-1995) is one of Canada's best-known and most prolific authors. He was born in Winnipeg and educated in England, where he socialized with some of the century's most prominent writers and intellectuals including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Herbert Read and T.S. Eliot. He returned to Canada in 1949 and taught at the University of British Columbia for many years. In 1959, he founded the journal Canadian Literature. His contribtution to Canadian culture is immeasurable; he either wrote or edited over one-hundred books including The Crystal Spirit, his Governor-Genral's award-winning biography of Orwell; Gabriel Dumont, another bestselling biography; and Anarchism a guide to the political philosophy which continues to be read around the world. His wide range of writing includes literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, plays, social history, biography, politics and essays.

George Woodcock's profile page