Writing
Orwell wrote diaries, made press-cuttings, and took photographs during his time in Spain, but they were all stolen before he left. In May 1937, he wrote the publisher of his previous books saying, "I greatly hope I come out of this alive if only to write a book about it."[35] According to his eventual publisher, "Homage was begun in February [1937] in the trenches, written on scraps, the backs of envelopes, toilet paper. The written material was sent to Barcelona to McNair's office, where his wife Eileen Blair, working as a volunteer, typed it out section by section. Slowly it grew into a sizable parcel. McNair kept it in his own room."[36]
Upon escaping across the French border in June 1937, he stopped at the first post office available to telegram the National Statesman, asking if it would like a first-hand article. The offer was accepted but the article, "Eyewitness in Barcelona",[37] was rejected by editor Kingsley Martin on grounds that his writing "could cause trouble"[38][39][40] (it was picked up by Controversy). In the months after leaving Spain, Orwell wrote a number of essays on the war, notably "Spilling the Spanish Beans" and a praiseful review of Franz Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit.
Writing from his cottage at Wallington, Hertfordshire, he finished around New Year's Day 1938.[41][18]
First edition
After Orwell had returned to England in 1937, his pitch for the memoir was quickly turned down by his own publisher Victor Gollancz, who worried that its publication might harm the cause of anti-fascism.[42] Orwell concluded that Gollancz was "part of the Communism-racket" and sought out a different publisher;[42][40] he was recommended by ILP secretary Fenner Brockway to Frederic Warburg, a publisher associated with the anti-Stalinist left, who agreed to a contract with Orwell.[42] In September, a deal was signed for an advance of £150 (equivalent to £10,000 in 2021).[18][43] By January 1938, Orwell had completed the book and, on 25 April 1938, Secker & Warburg published it under the title Homage to Catalonia. Orwell remarked to Jack Common that they hadn't been able to think of a better title.[42]
The book was initially commercially unsuccessful, selling only 683 copies (out of 1,500) in its first 6 months, with many copies of its initial print run remaining unsold at the time of Orwell's death in 1950.[44] Orwell himself had wondered if the book had been boycotted by the British press,[45] while publisher Fredric Warburg himself believed that the book had been "ignored and hectored into failure".[46] "Ten years ago it was almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Communism; today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or 'Trotskyism'," Orwell wrote bitterly in 1938.[47]
Later editions
Following the success of Orwell's later books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was posthumously recognised as a "lost classic" of the now-famous author.[48] The book received a second wave of sales after the first American edition was published by Harcourt Brace, in 1952, with an introduction from literary critic Lionel Trilling.[49] In Britain, Secker & Warburg published a new edition of the book in 1951; publication was taken over by Penguin Books in 1962 and it has never fallen out of print since then.[44] The book received a third wave of sales during the late 1960s, buoyed by interest from the period's counterculture and the New Left.[50] Historian Paul Preston speculated in 2017 that Homage had become the highest selling and most read book about the civil war.[51]
These later editions incorporated revisions requested by Orwell himself, in order to correct some mistakes he had made in the first edition and to rearrange the chapter sequence so the "general information" about political context was moved to an appendices.[52] In 1986, Peter Davison published an edition with a few footnotes based on Orwell's own footnotes found among his papers after he died.[53][54]
Translations
The only translation published in Orwell's lifetime was into Italian, in December 1948.[55] A French translation by Yvonne Davet—with whom Orwell corresponded, commenting on her translation and providing explanatory notes—in 1938–39, was not published until 1955, five years after Orwell's death.[56][54][53]
Orwell's Homage finally received publication in Spain during the early 1970s, although much its content was suppressed and distorted by the Francoist censors. It received a second Spanish edition in 1978, after the approval of the Spanish Constitution, but it wasn't until 2007 that an uncensored, comprehensive edition of the book was published in Spain.[57]
