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Eric Arthur Blair (1903 - January 21, 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was a British author best known for his political allegory novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Biography

Orwell was born in Bengal, British India, where his father worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His brought him to England at the age of 1 year; he did not see his father again until 1907 when the father made a 3 month visit to England, before leaving again until 1912. Young Orwell was an industrious student, and won scholarships first to St. Cyprian's School (which he recalled in his essay Such, Such Were The Joys) and then Eton, which he attended from 1917 to 1921. He joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922, but returned to England and resigned in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism (as can be seen in his first novel Burmese Days, published in 1934).

Orwell then lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work, as he recalled in Down and Out in Paris and London, his first work using his pen name. He eventually found work as a schoolteacher until ill health forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a Hampstead bookstore.

During the Spanish Civil War near the end of 1936 he fought as an infantry man in the anti-Stalinist POUM, or Worker's Party of Marxist Unification. Homage to Catalonia describes his personal feeling of the absence of any sense of class structure as he walked the streets of the revolutionized areas of Spain. He also depicted what he believed was the betrayal of that worker's revolution in Spain by the Communist Party, which was abetted in this betrayal by the Soviet Union.

Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly, until 1940. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1940 obtained a job working for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programs designed to gain support Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. He was quite aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot". Dispite the good pay, he quit this job in 1943.

In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist parable Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great critical and popular success.

From 1945 Blair was the Observer's war correspondent and later contributed regularly to the Manchester Evening News.

In 1949 his best known work, the distopian 1984, was published.

In 1949 Orwell spoke to a government body known as the Information Research Department, a body which encouraged the publication of anti-communist propaganda, offering them information on the "crypto-communist leanings" of some of his fellow writers and offering advice on how best to spread the anti-communist message. Orwell's motives for this are unclear, though it does not necessarily follow that he had abandoned socialism - merely that he detested Soviet Communism as was already crystal clear by his earlier published works.

Orwell died at 47 years old as the result of tuberculosis, which he probably contracted during the events described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life.

Orwell's Work

During most of his professional life time Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books such as Homage to Catalonia (describing his activities during the Spanish Civil War), and Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities).

Orwell is best remembered today for two of his novels, namely Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution with the onset of Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of such totalitarianism. Both of these books are often represented as being critical of socialism per se, which is only credible whilst in ignorance of Orwell's own socialist opinions.

Orwell was a committed socialist for most of his life, as a result of many of the experiences described in his books. This was in opposition to his middle-class upbringing. "You have nothing to lose but your aitches" as he once said in mockery of the strong rules over middle class pronunciation of the time.

Quotation

• "The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." -- From the essay "Why I Write"

Books

• Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
• Burmese Days (1934)
• Coming Up For Air
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
• The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
• Homage to Catalonia (1938)
• Animal Farm (1945)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Essays

• "Shooting an Elephant"
• "Politics and the English Language"
• "Inside the Whale"
• "Down the Mine"
• "England Your England"
• "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool"
• "Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels"
• "The Prevention of Literature"
• "Boys' Weeklies"
• "Spilling the Spanish Beans"

The above essays are all included in the book Inside the Whale.