The book

Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeThe Benefactor is the public ruler of the One State. Citizens unanimously “elect” him in a ritual that displays obedience rather than political choice. He personally operates the execution machine and defends the state’s destruction of freedom as a form of cruel but necessary love. He remains in power at the end, although the breach in the Green Wall shows that his control is incomplete.
If you like We
If you like Yevgeny Zamyatin
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

Aldous Huxley
English novelist of Brave New World, which he wrote not in Paris but on the Mediterranean coast at Sanary-sur-Mer. His French years ran from a rented house at Suresnes on the western edge of Paris, where he pushed the dying D. H. Lawrence towards the city's presses, to seven years on the Riviera; he then left for California, wrote the best-known modern account of taking mescaline, the hallucinogenic drug made from the peyote cactus, and died on the day President Kennedy was shot.
View author
George Orwell
English novelist, essayist and journalist, born Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was an imperial policeman in Burma, a plongeur in Paris kitchens off the rue Mouffetard, and a militiaman shot through the neck in Spain before any of it.
View author
Simone de Beauvoir
French writer and philosopher whose novels, memoirs, and social analysis examined freedom, gender, responsibility, aging, and the material conditions that shape a life.
View author



