George Orwell Biography

English novelist, essayist and critic, famous for his novels ANIMAL FARM (1945) and NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), classics of political satire. Although Orwell expressed leftist views, he remained to the end of his life an uncompromising individualist and political idealist, and was called by his contemporaries the conscience of his age.

George Orwell 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 came from a family of old Burma hands. In 1904 Orwell moved with his mother and sister to England. He attended Eton, where the old-fashioned British flogging was in use.Orwell published his first writings 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 were not happy. His bitter essay dealing with this period, SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS, was not published until 1968.

Orwell failed to win a scholarship to university and in 1922 he went to Burma to serve in the Indian Imperial Police (1922-27) as an assistant superintendent. Eventually Orwell's mounting dislike of imperialism led to his resignation. His revelations of the behaviour of the colonial officers appeared in SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1950) and in his early essay A Hanging (1931).

Orwell returned to Europe and lived as a tramp and beggar, working low paid jobs in England and France (1928-29). He had decided in 1928 to become a writer. Orwell's account of his experiences in poverty gave material for DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON (1933). From 1930 Orwell contributed regularly to the New Adelphi and in 1933 he assumed the pseudonym by which he would sign all his publications. 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. 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 Wallingford, Hertfordshire. In 1936 Orwell was commissioned 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'S PEER, is considered a milestone in modernliterary journalism.

In the1930s Orwell had adopted socialistic views and travelled to Spain to report on the Civil War. He fought alongside the United Workers Marxist Party militia and was wounded in the neck. 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.

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 lived mostly in Jura in the Western Isles of Scotland.

The biting satire of Communist ideology in The Animal Farm made Orwell for the first time prosperous. His other world wide success was Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the classical works of science fiction along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and H.G. Wells novels Time Machine, War of The World and Invisible Man. 1984 was a bitter protest against the nightmarish direction in which the author believed the modern world was moving. In the story, Britania has become Airstrip One in the superstate Oceania, which is ruled by the head of the Party, Big Brother. The Party's agents constantly rewrite history. The official language is Newspeak, and the society is dominated by such slogans as "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strenght." Orwell shows that the destruction of language is part of all other destrucive social aims. The hero, Winston Smith, a minor Party operative, keeps a secret diary and has a brief love affair with a girl named Julia. He is arrested by the Thought Police, tortured and brainwashed. His spirit broken, Winston finally learns to love Big Brother. Some critics have related Smith's sufferings to those the author underwent at preparatory school. Orwel has said that the book was written "to alter other people's idea of the kind of society they should strive after."

Orwell's wife died in 1945 and in 1949 he married Sonia Browell. Orwell died from tuberculosis in London on January 21, 1950, soon after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 1998 Martin Seymour-Smith listed Orwell's dystopia among 100 most influential books ever written. Orwell himself implicitly acknowledge his debt to Evgeny Zamyatin's (1884-1937) novel We (in Russia My), which was written in 1920 and translated into English 1924.

Although Orwell is best-known as a novelist, his essays are among the finest of the 20th-century. He also produced newspaper articles and reviews, which were written for money, but he carefully crafted his other essays for such journals as Partisan Review, Adelphi and Horizon. Orwell united political purpose and literary ambitions into a sharp analysis of bureauctatic institutions and cultural elite. Without hesititon he accused that Yeats is a fascist. H.G. Wells was out of touch with reality, Salvador Dali he found decadent, but defended P.G. Wodehouse and rehabilitated Kilping. In 'Why Write?' and 'Politics and the English Language' (1948) Orwell argued that writers have an obligtion of fighting social injustice, oppression, and the power of totalitarian regimes. Orwell's view of the class bounded language has had a deep effect on the political discourse of our time.