Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (1933)

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Published during the Depression, Down and Out was his first published book. Orwell, a British writer, is better known for his later dystopian fiction: Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four.

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Down and Out, by contrast, is a realistic depiction of what it meant to be a young and penniless writer, kicking aimlessly about Paris and London between the two world wars. Ben Yagoda, in Memoir: A History, says the work is a "half-autobiographical, half-journalistic account of his time as a plongeur [dishwasher] in a Paris restaurant and a tramp in England." 

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I found it depressingly hopeless as well as boring because Orwell doesn't seem to exhibit any ambition or determination to "rise above" that Americans like me are used to seeing in stories of this kind.

     

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