A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: English novelist, essayist and critic. Eric Blair, was born in Bengal, India, in June 25, 1903 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. Orwell joined in 1922 the Indian Imperial Police in Burma for five years, an experience that later found expression in the novel Burmese Days (1934). He eventually resigned because of his increasing disillusionment with British imperialism. Shooting an elephant (1950) is a collection of essays revealing the behaviour of the colonial officers. After a period doing a variety of jobs in France he returned to England where opened a village shop. Using the pseudonym, George Orwell, he began writing articles for magazines. His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), was a nonfictional account--moving and comic at the same time--of several years of self-imposed poverty he had experienced after leaving Burma. 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. He published three other novels in the 1930s: A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939). In 1936 Orwell married Eileen O'Shaugnessy, a doctor's daughter and was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to produce a documentary account of unemployment in the north of England for his Left Book Club. The Road to Wigan Pier was a detailed, sympathetic, and yet objective study of the lives of nearly impoverished miners in the Lancashire town of Wigan and established Orwell as one of Britain's leading writers and marked a high point in literary journalism. Orwell, a committed socialist, went to Spain in December 1936 to report on the Spanish Civil War. He soon decided to join the struggle against the Nationalist Army and became a member of the Lenin Division in Barcelona, a unit under the control of the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). In January 1937 Orwell, given the rank of corporal, was sent to join the offensive at Aragón. The following month he was moved to Huesca. After 115 days at the frontline he was granted leave and he returned to Barcelona. While there he witnessed the May Riots. Orwell returned to Huesca on 12th May. Promoted to second lieutenant, he commanded a unit of 30 men. Soon after arriving back at the front he was hit by a sniper's bullet which passed through his neck. As a result of the wound, Orwell's left side was paralyzed and he temporarily lost his voice. While in hospital Orwell heard that the Workers Party of Marxist Unification had been declared an illegal organization. Orwell was now in danger of being murdered by communists in the Republican Army. With the help of the British Consul in Barcelona, Orwell was able to escape to France. The war made him a strong opposer of communism and an advocate of the English brand of socialism. When Orwell returned to England he wrote about his experiences of the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia (1938). In the book Orwell attempted to expose the propaganda disseminated by newspapers in Britain. This included attacks on both the right-wing press and the Daily Worker, a paper controlled by the Communist Party. Although one of the best books ever written about war, it sold only 1,500 copies during the next twelve years. Orwell published Coming up for Air in 1939. He 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. His main task was to write the scripts for a weekly news commentary on the Second World War. Orwell's scripts were broadcast to the people of India between the end of 1941 and early 1943. In 1943 Aneurin Bevan, the editor of the socialist journal Tribune, recruited Orwell to write a weekly column, As I Please. Orwell's plain, lucid style, made him highly effective as a campaigning journalist and some of his best writing was done during this period. Orwell next book, Animal Farm, was a satire in fable form of the communist revolution in Russia. The book, heavily influenced by his experiences of the way communists behaved during the Spanish Civil War, upset many of his left-wing friends and his former publisher, Victor Gollancz, rejected it. Published in 1945, Animal Farm became one of Britain's most popular books. Orwell's final book was influenced by his failing health and his disillusionment with a Labour government that had been elected with a large majority in the 1945 General Election but made little attempt to introduce the kind of socialism that he believed in. After the war Orwell lived mostly on the remote island of Jura in the Western Isles of Scotland. With Eileen he had adopted a little boy. In 1945 Orwell reviewed the anti-Utopian novel We by Yevgeni Zamyatin for Tribune. The book inspired his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Published in 1949, the book was a pessimistic satire about the threat of political tyranny in the future. The novel had a tremendous impact and many of the new words and phrases used in the book passed into everyday language. These pair of novels (Animal Farm and 1984) brought him his first fame and almost his only remuneration as a writer. His wartime work for the BBC (published in the collections George Orwell: The Lost Writings, and The War Commentaries) gave him a solid taste of bureaucratic hypocrisy and may have provided the inspiration for his invention of "newspeak," the truth-denying language of Big Brother's rule in Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell died of tuberculosis in January 21, 1950, in London. Orwell's reputation rests not only on his political shrewdness and his sharp satires but also on his marvelously clear style and on his superb essays, which rank with the best ever written. Politics and the English Language (1950), which links authoritarianism with linguistic decay, has been widely influential. The four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell was published in 1968. |
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