George Orwell

Or Eric Blair. As nonfiction writers go, Orwell is among my favorites. During and after earning my graduate degree in history I found myself reading almost everying he wrote. The one that endures among others is Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell was a beacon of truth in a time of much bullshit. He favored socialism in postwar England, but he wasn't afraid to take on Socialism, both in the grand and petty forms. In The Road to Wigan Pier he has a famous piece where he's on a bus in the country that stops and picks up two riders dressed - unconventionally - in shorts, with sandals and other accoutrement that elicits the comment from other riders, under their breath, "socialists". Orwell confesses he had the same thought - these geeks are socialists. He goes on to discuss the practical impediments to bringing Socialism to England, but not fatalistically, rather in a way that would ease the transition.
What poverty truly felt like, that was where Orwell excelled as a reporter, in part by living poor. In both Wigan Pier and Down and Out he writes of being poor; in Down and Out he spends months living in flophouses and eating garbage, then returns to England where he discovers the promised job isn't there and once again he is poor. Now he does a tour of the poor houses in England, and one is living again in miserable conditions, living among the unwashed and dying.
Lesser titles: Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which he himself called his least favorite work; again, it focuses harshly on class and economics. Burmese Days covers his early years as a petty bureaucrat in India.
1984 is his best known title, and it is a tour de force, but as a work of ficition left me a little bored. Orwell was at his best writing in the first person, writing about the world he was living in.