"After his return to the front, he was wounded in the throat by a sniper's bullet. At 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m), Orwell was considerably taller than the Spanish fighters[76] and had been warned against standing against the trench parapet. Unable to speak, and with blood pouring from his mouth, Orwell was carried on a stretcher to Siétamo, loaded on an ambulance and after a bumpy journey via Barbastro arrived at the hospital at Lérida. He recovered sufficiently to get up and on 27 May 1937 was sent on to Tarragona and two days later to a POUM sanatorium in the suburbs of Barcelona. The bullet had missed his main artery by the barest margin and his voice was barely audible. It had been such a clean shot that the wound immediately went through the process of cauterisation. He received electrotherapy treatment and was declared medically unfit for service..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
"No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients-- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." https://books.google.com/books?id=OJkLDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA204
Suppose Orwell had died fighting for the POUM? It's not like his work would be totally unknown today--there would still be the early novels, The Road to Wigan Pier, etc.--but apart from specialists in interwar British literature or in the British Left of the 1930's, would anyone pay much attention? At least those Communist Party members who died in Spain had a powerful organization to help make their work famous. There weren't very many British fans of the POUM, apart from the ILP.
Would more attention be paid to other anti-totalitarian novelists like Koestler or to other dystopians like Zamyatin? No, it doesn't work that way. The success of Orwell's late novels probably focused more attention on works of an analogous nature by other writers than they would otherwise have received.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
"No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients-- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." https://books.google.com/books?id=OJkLDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA204
Suppose Orwell had died fighting for the POUM? It's not like his work would be totally unknown today--there would still be the early novels, The Road to Wigan Pier, etc.--but apart from specialists in interwar British literature or in the British Left of the 1930's, would anyone pay much attention? At least those Communist Party members who died in Spain had a powerful organization to help make their work famous. There weren't very many British fans of the POUM, apart from the ILP.
Would more attention be paid to other anti-totalitarian novelists like Koestler or to other dystopians like Zamyatin? No, it doesn't work that way. The success of Orwell's late novels probably focused more attention on works of an analogous nature by other writers than they would otherwise have received.