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'George Orwell was the pen name used by Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950). Born in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service, his family moved to England in 1907 and he attended Eton from 1917 to 1921. He joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922, but resigned in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism (as can be seen in his first novel Burmese Days, published in 934). He lived for several years in poverty after resigning, sometimes homeless, and 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. He later 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 worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1940 to 1943. From 1945 Blair was the Observers war correspondant and later contributed regularly to the Manchester Evening News.

During his 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 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.

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.

He is probably best remembered in modern times 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 opinions.

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.

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.