19491776 Club
Harcourt Brace publishes Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; the author is in a sanatorium, too ill to mark the day
The American first printing of 20,000 copies sells out almost immediately, typed out by Orwell himself through fever and bloody coughing fits at a remote farmhouse on Jura.
By the time Harcourt Brace released his novel on June 13, 1949, George Orwell was already in a sanatorium in the Cotswolds, too ill to celebrate. He had retyped the final manuscript himself at Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura, through bouts of fever and bloody coughing fits — tuberculosis eating through him while he produced the book that would define the century. The American first printing of 20,000 copies sold out almost immediately, followed by another 10,000 on July 1 and again in September. By 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four topped the country's all-time best seller list…
