Richard Hughes Gibson in The Hedgehog Review:
In 1946 a short-lived British literary journal named Gangrel—a Scots word meaning “tramp” or “vagrant”—announced an upcoming issue in which leading writers would address the theme of “Why I Write.” Multiple contributors then dropped out or changed topics, and even the pieces that came in were not entirely in line with the editors’ stated interest in writing as a “vocational task.” The issue would be Gangrel’s last. Yet one submission, George Orwell’s, would endure, giving the editors’ assigned title an unanticipated afterlife in numerous subsequent writers’ testimonies. (“Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell,” Joan Didion observes at the beginning of her 1976 essay, “Why I Write.”)
Orwell’s essay is so memorable because he did not do as he was asked.
More here.