Spanish Civil War labourers, and parts of the middle class. The conservative, strongly Catholic Basque country, along with Catholic Galicia and the more left-leaning Catalonia, sought autonomy or independence from the central government of Madrid. The Republican government allowed for the possibility of self-government for the two regions, whose forces were gathered under the People's Republican Army ("Ejército Popular Republicano", or EPR), which was reorganized into mixed brigades after October 1936. A few well-known people fought on the Republican side, such as English novelist George Orwell (who wrote "Homage to Catalonia" (1938), an account of his experiences in the war) and Canadian thoracic
George Orwell bibliography 1958.) His publisher followed up these anthologies with "Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays" in 1950, "England Your England and Other Essays" in 1953—which was revised as "Such, Such Were the Joys"—and "Collected Essays" in 1961. The first significant publications in the United States were Doubleday's "A Collection of Essays by George Orwell" from 1954, 1956's "The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage" from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Penguin's "Selected Essays" in 1957; re-released in 1962 with the title "Inside the Whale and Other Essays" and in abridged form as "Why I Write" in 2005 as a part of the