"You have talked so often of going to the dogs," observed George Orwell, "and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them." Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, this 1933 memoir follows his eye-opening travails as he works as a dishwasher in a seedy Parisian hotel, sleeping in bug-infested hostels alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist, and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Returning to his native Britain, Orwell went undercover as a tramp, and as he recounts here, the experience shattered his illusions about the haves and the have nots.