The goal of my paper will be to further a conversation coming out of the 1990s about the role of verification in pragmatism and what it means about the kind of contribution a pragmatist might make to public affairs. The paper builds on the work of my 1997 book The Practical Muse in turning, for an example of a Jamesian pragmatist, to modernist literature. In this case, however, I point not to modernist poets but to a writer of modernist prose who happens also to be one of the twentieth century’s most influential public philosophers: George Orwell. It will be my contention that we can see James’s position on verification both mirrored in Orwell and validated by that association.