When George Orwell Got in a Fight With the Anarchist Author of The Joy of Sex: New at Reason

In 1972 Dr. Alex Comfort had a colossal hit with The Joy of Sex, making him suddenly rich and famous. Less famously, in World War II Britain, a much younger Alex Comfort had a heated dispute in print with George Orwell.

Orwell was an enthusiastic supporter of the war against Hitler, while Comfort was opposed to the war. Outside narrow literary and political circles, neither man was very well-known. Orwell had published several books and dozens of articles, but he had yet to write Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. Comfort, 17 years Orwell’s junior, had produced a couple of novels, several poems, and some works of anarchist theory. His most enduring work came a few years later: Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State, which makes a good case that politics is an artificial game preserve for the kinds of anti-social predators whom it is a function of normal social life to curb and discourage.

Later, Comfort was to make his name as a medical researcher and a gerontologist—a scientific theorist of aging. He could little have dreamt, in 1942, that his novels, his poems, and political writings would never attract a wide readership, that his medical studies would be known only to specialists, and that he would yet become, at least for a few years, the most famous man in the world—”Dr. Sex.” He could also scarcely have imagined that, despite outliving Orwell by 50 years (Orwell died in 1950, Comfort in 2000), and despite becoming briefly a household name, even his extraordinary fame would ultimately be far surpassed by Orwell’s, writes David Ramsey Steele in his latest piece for Reason.

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