Last reviewed: June 2017
British novelist and essayist
June 25, 1903
Motihari, Bengal, India
January 21, 1950
London, England
George Orwell, with an international reputation based on his two finest works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, has emerged as a prominent prose stylist and perhaps the twentieth century’s most important political writer. Born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, at Motihari in Bengal, India, he was the second child of Richard Walmesley Blair and Ida Mabel Limouzin Blair. Richard Blair, an administrator in the Opium Department of the government of India, had a singularly undistinguished career, and in 1905 his wife and two young children returned to England, where he did not permanently join them until his retirement in 1911.
{$S[A]Blair, Eric Arthur;Orwell, George}
Orwell’s early years in Edwardian Henley-on-Thames, although basically idyllic, fostered within him a sense of his family’s precarious position. The ambivalence he felt as a member of the “lower-upper class,” a phrase he used to contrast his family’s social aspirations and their middle-class budget, was heightened during his years in a prestigious preparatory school, St. Cyprian’s, which he first attended in 1911. Orwell enjoyed the freer intellectual atmosphere that he found when he enrolled in Eton College in 1917; he read widely and began to question the conventions of his upbringing, although he did not excel academically. George Orwell
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Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police and accepted a posting to Burma in 1921. His experiences there proved to be the epitome of all that he despised in the British social system: The natives were resentful and oppressed, the British officers arrogant and prejudiced, and everywhere distinctions of class and power figured absolutely. In August of 1927, Orwell returned to England on leave and almost immediately resigned his position and announced his intention of becoming a writer, a profession for which he had shown no previous inclination.
After several fruitless months in England, he moved to Paris, where he began to polish his craft. He published several articles in Parisian newspapers on social concerns such as unemployment, poverty, and politics, issues that would continue to dominate his writing. He also wrote two novels and many short stories, all of which were rejected by publishers. At the end of his stay, destitute and starving, he took a job in a Paris hotel, and out of this experience he fashioned the rough drafts of what would later become Down and Out in Paris and London, which he expanded with additional material gleaned from several months spent “tramping” among the poor in London. The book combines personal narrative with biting social criticism, a style that became the trademark of Orwell’s early work.
The minor success of his first book was followed by the rapid appearance of three novels, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, all of which feature protagonists who grapple with the inequities of poverty and social oppression in a world that values money and position. Then, in 1937, a work appeared that joined Orwell’s social consciousness to a clear political agenda, The Road to Wigan Pier, a detailed study of poor coal miners in Yorkshire and Lancashire. For the first time, Orwell identified himself specifically with the goals of socialism, although his endorsement was tempered by criticism.
This stance placed him on the fringes of leftist politics in the 1930’s, and his distrust of the Communist Party crystallized during his sojourn in Spain, ostensibly as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War, although he joined an active combat force almost as soon as he arrived. Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938, relates his experiences fighting the spread of Fascism. After a brief interlude spent in Morocco recovering from a tubercular hemorrhage, during which time he wrote Coming Up for Air, Orwell plunged himself into the wartime arena of London, where he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and wrote extensively for various newspapers and journals. Animal Farm, a political allegory famous for its depiction (using barnyard animals) of socialism gone sour, was written in late 1943 and early 1944 but not published until the war ended in 1945; it was seen as a potentially dangerous attack on the Soviet Union, then a powerful Western ally.
Orwell’s first wife died in 1945, during an operation, leaving their adopted son, Richard, in Orwell’s care. In 1946 he published a collection of essays on popular culture, Critical Essays (published in the United States as Dickens, Dali, and Others). Orwell then fled London for the primitive and secluded island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland, where he began work on his most famous book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Shortly after the novel, with its grim description of the authoritarian state of the future, was published in 1949, Orwell suffered a serious attack of tuberculosis. He died in London on January 21, 1950, leaving behind his second wife, Sonia Brownell Blair, whom he had married the previous October.
Orwell’s insistent social and political writing has made him one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. His vision of a totalitarian future in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which made household words of concepts such as “doublethink” and “Big Brother,” has fascinated and frightened generations of readers who have taken his work as a prophecy and a warning. Orwell’s legacy transcends that suggested by his most famous works, for in other ways he espoused some very traditional values about the role of the artist. Committed to intellectual integrity, Orwell passionately believed in the power of language for good and for ill; it was the artist’s responsibility to foster the right use of language and to give voice to the otherwise inarticulate longings of humanity. Clear and unfettered thought was inherent in clear writing, Orwell believed, and his own plain speech, unsparingly direct both in words and in meaning, vigorously informs all of his work—his essays, articles, and novels as well as his social criticism.