In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay called "The Prevention of Literature."

It is included in the Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, a four-volume work, and available at www.georgeorwell.org, online.

In it, he says writers are not silenced by active persecution so much as by the general drift of society.

The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. [Ministry of Information] and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he's in the right.

I'd say the general societal drift has continued in the same direction. If anything, the situation is more perilous for a literary writer now than conditions were for George Orwell in 1946. He published Animal Farm in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949.

His books are in print.

His stature has grown, since then.

The phrase Orwellian has entered the language. To describe totalitarian government, media monopolies, the manipulation of public opinion for political ends, and the disingenuousness of political propaganda and commercial advertising.

There are now seven publishers to send your work to, and they aren't book publishers in the conventional sense, they are corporate conglomerates.

What is a conglomerate?

A conglomerate is an enterprise that contains several different businesses, or even industries, like books, films, and television programs.

Books used to criticize films or television. It's harder to do if the company that publishes your book also owns the company you are criticizing, or making fun of, and one does not see books like Inside New York Publishing or New York Publishing Confidential.

Why not? Well, you don't bite the hand that feeds you.

A writer can be fearless about attacking any subject except the conditions writers work under. That's taboo.

One taboo destroys your engine. You destroy it yourself by heeding it. It is corrosive. You eat your own mechanism from the inside out. Any thought can lead in the wrong direction. Censoring yourself is tricky. It can't be done halfway. In for a penny, in for a pound. A writer censors himself. To get published.

This is the most pernicious effect corporate ownership of book publishing companies has on the inner life of writers, or the writing life, if writing is a life of the mind, that seeks to get at, and witness to, the truth, as an existential act.

If that's what you want to do you're in the wrong business.

If you're a writer, that's what you must do. You must find a way to write about it. And publish it.

You must fight.

You're in the right business.

You're in the right place at the right time. You're in the vanguard, the avant-garde, the avant-garde is the cowcatcher on the train.

Getting at the truth may be an unintended side-effect of book publishing, but it's not its raison d'être. Its raison d'être is maximizing profit. And guarding against the publishing of books that question profit maximization as a raison d'être. Publishing books that protect the system from criticism from inside.

Business majors have an us-and-them mindset. They're in cahoots. You're with them or again' 'em. You can't fake it and you can't hide it. You will be found out.

They have the latest technology. They make it their business to know who the enemy is, and what he's up to. To detect threats before they become serious. To nip things in the bud.

Troublemakers are selected against. They are selected out. How do you do that? You weigh them in the balance and find them wanting. On grounds of quality.

They don't know their craft.

They are rank amateurs.

They aren't good enough.

You select them out by not selecting them. You reject them with a form letter, or no reply.

Nixon gave his enemies a sword, I give the Mall Builder culture an enema. Enema vérité. What you see on the end of the fork when you really look.

Sometimes, to see what's on the fork we have to eat with chopsticks.

Nudity, sex, and excretion. If a writer is obscene, it's easy to censor him. He's obscene.

All societies have standards, and protect themselves from violations of the norm. You can't have offensive material floating around without any check on it. It harms the young. The gullible. The credible. The booboisie. Literature is the best that a society can do, not the worst, or a great sea of mediocrity. A great swamp of blandness and formula and titillation that knows when to stop.

Nielsen BookScan provides data to the publishing industry on sales figures for books. They keep historical data on individual titles by authors. If an author's last book didn't do well, his next book might not be published. He has to do better every time out. He has to show increasing sales. If he starts high enough he can slip once, but the overall trend must be up. The idea of building a writing career slowly, book after book, is not practicable anymore. You're expected to sell a lot of books, each time, and to sell more books, every time.

Book chains read the numbers. If a book chain doesn't like the number, they won't order the book. If a book chain won't order it, a publisher won't buy it. Won't acquire it.

What they are looking for is a book that Oprah will plug on her television show.

If you make fun of Oprah, or television, or a business that is looking for product that passes the Oprah test, your product might not be right for the only business you can deal with, if you want to have a career as a mainstream commercial writer.

It's the only game in town.

There isn't an alternative, more forgiving game, a more lenient standard, a softer, gentler game, it's a game of winner-take-all, dog-eat-dog, Fuck you, Jack--I'm all right.

Changed, in the movie version, to I'm All Right Jack.

In I'm All Right Jack, Peter Sellers plays a union shop steward and Terry Thomas plays an efficiency expert, or time-and-motion man. They work for a factory selling guided missiles to a Middle Eastern country.

The difference is, writers don't have a union. They can't go on strike. They deal with the company on the company's terms or the company simply excludes them.

This is not censorship. It's business.

Marketplace censorship.

Marketplace censorship isn't censorship, it's just the market. The impersonal forces of supply and demand.

The Invisible Hand.

The Fickle Finger of Fate.

You were diddled by the single-digit finger-puppet.

The invisible hand is invisible. For all you know you could be paranoid.