George Orwell

George Orwell [pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950), journalist, political author and novelist wrote Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

George Orwell (1903-1950) was born in Motihari, Bengal, India, as the second child of Richard Walmesley Blair and Ida Mabel Limonzin. His father was a civil servant in the opium department and his mother was the daughter of a tea-merchant in Burma. In 1904 Orwell moved with his mother and sister to England, where he attended Eton. His first writings Orwell published in college periodicals. During these years Orwell developed his antipathy towards the English class systems. Also Orwell's years at St Cyprian's Preparatory School in Easbourne were not happy. His bitter, barely disguised attack on St. Cyprian's, SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS, was not published until 1968 for fear of libel action.

At the age of seventeen Orwell had his first experiences as an "amateur tramp" in Plymouth, where he was stranded accidentally without much money. After Orwell failing to win a scholarship to university, Orwell went in 1922 to Burma to serve in the Indian Imperial Police (1922-27) as an assistant superintendent. Like his colleagues, Orwell had a native mistresses. Eventually Orwell's mounting dislike of imperial rule led to his resignation. SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1950) is collection of essays revealing the behaviour of the colonial officers. One of his most famous early essays is 'A Hanging' (1931), in which a Hindu man is hanged in a hurry, but with a great routine. "An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily."

Orwell returned to Europe and lived as a tramp and beggar, working low paid jobs in England and France (1928-29), where his aunt lived. He picked hops in Kent as a migratory laborer and once Orwell tried to get himself arrested as a drunk to have some knowledge about life in prison. After forty-eight hours he was released. In 1928 he had decided to become a writer, but his first amateurish efforts arose smiles. A poet friend described him "like a cow with a musket." Orwell's experiences in poverty gave material for DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON (1933).

However, the author was never a full-time vagrant, but he stayed every now and then with his older sister or with his parents, and plunged to the lower depths of society like an explorer. "The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who ave fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work." (from Down and Out in Paris and London) From 1930 Orwell contributed regularly to the New Adelphi. In 1933 he assumed the pseudonym by which he would sign all his publications - Orwell was the name of a small river in East Anglia, and George was definitely a British Christian name.

Unable to support himself with his writings, Orwell took up a teaching post at a private school, where he finished his first novel, BURMESE DAYS (1934). In 1936 Orwell married Eileen O'Shaugnessy, a doctor's daughter. KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING, the story of a young bookseller's assistant, appeared in 1936. From 1936 to 1940 Orwell worked as a shopkeeper in Wallington, Hertfordshire. He was commissioned in 1936 by the publisher Victor Gollancz to produce a documentary account of unemployment in the North of England for the Left Book Club. The result, THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER, is considered a milestone in modern literary journalism. In the1930s Orwell had adopted socialistic views.

Like many other writers, he travelled to Spain to report on the Civil War. He fought alongside the United Workers Marxist Party militia and was shot through the throat by a Francoist sniper’s bullet. When Stalinists on their own side started to hunt down Anarchists and his friends were thrown into prison, Orwell escaped with his Eileen Blair from the chaos. The war made him a strong opposer of communism and an advocate of the English brand of socialism. Orwell's book on Spain, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, appeared in 1938 after some troubles with its publication. The book was coldly received by left-wing intelligentsia, who regarded Communists as heroes of the war. In Orwell’s lifetime Homage to Catalonia sold only about fifty copies a year.

Orwell had opposed a war with Germany, declaring that the British Empire was worse than Hitler, but during World War II Orwell served as a sergeant in the Home Guard and worked as a journalist for the BBC, Observer and Tribune, where he was literary editor from 1943 to 1945. Toward the end of the war, he wrote Animal Farm, which depicted the betrayal of a revolution.

After the war, Orwell went to Germany as a reporter, but in his dispatches he sent to The Observer and The Manchester Evening News, he did not mention the extermination camps or Auschwitz. In England he lived mostly on the remote island of Jura in the Western Isles of Scotland. With Eileen he had adopted a little boy. His wife died in 1945 - "Yes, she was a good old stick," Orwell said to his friend. In 1949 Orwell married Sonia Brownell (1918-1980), who had been an editorial assistant on Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon. Her marriage to Orwell lasted only three months. Orwell died from tuberculosis in London University Hospital on January 21, 1950, soon after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four.