Down and Out in Paris and London

The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though we trapped a few of them. Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. Down and Out in Paris and London is one of the great accounts of life in the underclass: of being hard-up and hungry, of sleeping in seedy hostels and working in squalid restaurants. George Orwell's first book--published in 1933, when he was not yet thirty--is alive with the sights and smells of poverty. It is a revelatory memoir of surviving at the margins.