George Orwell
George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, was born in 1903 in India, where his father was a minor British Official. His family, excluding his father, moved back to England around a year after his birth. He had been looked down upon on at school for his poverty, with Orwell later recalling that he “had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued”. It was also know that he had supposedly written his first poem at the age of four, and had his poem published in the local newspaper seven years later.
After completing his education in 1922 at Eton College, where he had earned a scholarship to, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He resigned five years later, to focus on becoming a writer. According to ‘Why I Write’, an essay written by Orwell detailing his journey to becoming a writer, his profession as an Imperial Police had ‘increased my (his) natural hatred of authority’, and ‘every line of serious work that I have written since 1937 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.’
Orwell moved to Paris a year later, writing freelance for numerous newspapers, had failed, and was forced to do menial jobs such as dishwashing and kitchen porting for a living. After returning back to England in 1929, he adopted the name ‘George Orwell’ as a pen name for his first book, ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, 1933, describing his experiences in Paris as a commoner, life as one of Paris’s poor, and himself, who had worked as a plongeur, otherwise known as a dishwasher, working fourteen hours a day with no rest.
In 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, and simultaneously joined the Republican militia for long enough to be promoted to the rank of second lieutenant. Fighting on the front lines soon lead to a mishap of Orwell suffering permanent damage to his throat, ‘endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness’. [9]
A year later, he joined an anti-Stalinist Spanish Trotskyist ‘Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista’ (POUM), and fought against the Franco’s Nationalists for the Spanish government. Orwell had commented on Francisco Franco’s military uprising as “an attempt not so much to impose fascism as to restore feudalism.”[8] Nonetheless, the communists eventually gained control, and many of Blair’s friends, also supporters of POUM were either shot or arrested, while Orwell himself had to flee to France. ‘Homage to Catalonia’ was written afterwards as a recount of his experiences in Spain, and according to BBC, this ‘experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist’. [3]
In 1945, ‘Animal Farm’ was published, ‘a political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution’ [3], resulting in Orwell became financially stable for the first time in his life. ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ was published four years later, and according to the Guardian, ‘was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill’.
George Orwell died a year later, on 21 January 1950, of tuberculosis.
After completing his education in 1922 at Eton College, where he had earned a scholarship to, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He resigned five years later, to focus on becoming a writer. According to ‘Why I Write’, an essay written by Orwell detailing his journey to becoming a writer, his profession as an Imperial Police had ‘increased my (his) natural hatred of authority’, and ‘every line of serious work that I have written since 1937 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.’
Orwell moved to Paris a year later, writing freelance for numerous newspapers, had failed, and was forced to do menial jobs such as dishwashing and kitchen porting for a living. After returning back to England in 1929, he adopted the name ‘George Orwell’ as a pen name for his first book, ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, 1933, describing his experiences in Paris as a commoner, life as one of Paris’s poor, and himself, who had worked as a plongeur, otherwise known as a dishwasher, working fourteen hours a day with no rest.
In 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, and simultaneously joined the Republican militia for long enough to be promoted to the rank of second lieutenant. Fighting on the front lines soon lead to a mishap of Orwell suffering permanent damage to his throat, ‘endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness’. [9]
A year later, he joined an anti-Stalinist Spanish Trotskyist ‘Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista’ (POUM), and fought against the Franco’s Nationalists for the Spanish government. Orwell had commented on Francisco Franco’s military uprising as “an attempt not so much to impose fascism as to restore feudalism.”[8] Nonetheless, the communists eventually gained control, and many of Blair’s friends, also supporters of POUM were either shot or arrested, while Orwell himself had to flee to France. ‘Homage to Catalonia’ was written afterwards as a recount of his experiences in Spain, and according to BBC, this ‘experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist’. [3]
In 1945, ‘Animal Farm’ was published, ‘a political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution’ [3], resulting in Orwell became financially stable for the first time in his life. ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ was published four years later, and according to the Guardian, ‘was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill’.
George Orwell died a year later, on 21 January 1950, of tuberculosis.