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Nornagest comments on Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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A work doesn't need to inform daily life in order to be didactic. 1984 is about the dynamics of totalitarianism, Animal Farm is a thinly fictionalized Russian Revolution, Down and Out in London and Paris is about class relations in Western Europe, and so forth -- but practically everything Orwell wrote was primarily meant to be instructive in some way.
Maybe I have too precise a definition, but I think "didactic" should mean giving advice, and not just information. Almost all fiction is about psychological insight, but that isn't directly practical. And I don't mean "practical" in a daily life way: the reason I don't count Animal Farm as didactic isn't because I'm not a Bolshevik, but because even if I were, it still wouldn't tell me how to change the course of the revolution.
By that definition nearly all serious fiction is didactic and there are plenty of people in the English department who find didactic elements in the rest.
blacktrance used didactic to mean "teachings that are applicable to one's life". I don't think Orwell fits.
I wouldn't say "nearly all", but quite a lot of it, yes, and probably a larger fraction since 1945. That's the point.
I don't think we should restrict the word to everyday living, but if we did, I could point to Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand, and plenty of others.