George Orwell bibliography and Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich in 1968–1970. Peter Davison of De Montfort University spent 17 years researching and correcting the entirety of Orwell's works with Angus and Sheila Davison, and devoted the last eleven volumes of the twenty-volume series "The Complete Works of George Orwell" to essays, letters, and journal entries. The entire series was initially printed by Secker and Warburg in 1986, finished by Random House in 1998, and revised between 2000 and 2002. Starting with "The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941), several of Orwell's longer essays took the form of pamphlets: Orwell was not widely known for writing verse,
George Orwell "self-interested." Literary critic James Wood wrote that in the struggle, as he saw it, between Christianity and humanism, "Orwell was on the humanist side, of course—basically an unmetaphysical, English version of Camus's philosophy of perpetual godless struggle." Orwell's writing was often explicitly critical of religion, and Christianity in particular. He found the church to be a "selfish [...] church of the landed gentry" with its establishment "out of touch" with the majority of its communicants and altogether a pernicious influence on public life. In their 1972 study, "The Unknown Orwell", the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams noted that at