The Benefactor
The Benefactor is the public ruler of the One State.
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.
Mary Shelley
The author of Frankenstein, who first saw Paris at sixteen as a runaway. In the summer of 1814 she crossed from England to Calais with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, spent a week trapped in an expensive Paris hotel with no money, then bought a donkey and walked south-east across a France still wrecked by the Napoleonic wars. That journey became her first published book. Two years later, on a lake in Switzerland, she began her second.
View author
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
Arthur Koestler
Hungarian-British novelist and essayist whose fiction examined revolution, ideology, imprisonment, and political disillusionment.
View author