- Pseudonym of:
- Eric Arthur Blair
Top Questions
What did George Orwell write?
George Orwell wrote the political fable
Animal Farm
(1944), the anti-utopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-four
(1949), the unorthodox political treatise
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937), and the autobiographical
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933), which contains essays that recount actual events in a fictionalized form.
Where was George Orwell educated?
George Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and
Eton
colleges. He briefly attended the former before transferring to the latter, where
Aldous Huxley
was one of his teachers. Instead of going on to a university, Orwell entered the British Imperial service and worked as a colonial police officer.
What was George Orwell’s family like?
George Orwell was brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery, first in India and then in England. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service and his mother was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant. Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry.”
Why was George Orwell famous?
George Orwell wrote two hugely influential novels:
Animal Farm
(1944), a satire that allegorically depicted
Joseph Stalin
’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and
Nineteen Eighty-four
(1949), a chilling warning against totalitarianism. The latter deeply impressed readers with ideas that entered mainstream culture in a way achieved by few books.
George Orwell
(born June 25, 1903,
Motihari
, Bengal, India?died January 21, 1950, London, England) was an English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels
Animal Farm
(1945) and
Nineteen Eighty-four
(1949), the latter a profound anti-
utopian
novel that examines the dangers of
totalitarian
rule.
Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book,
Down and Out in Paris and London
, appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell (the
surname
he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in
East Anglia
). In time his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell’s lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel.
Early life
He was born in Bengal, into the
class
of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (
Myanmar
). Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to
social status
had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to
England
, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory
boarding school
on the
Sussex
coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his
intellectual
brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn,
eccentric
boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay,
Such, Such Were the Joys
(1953).
Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and
Eton
, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921.
Aldous Huxley
was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of
matriculating
at a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel
Burmese Days
and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “
Shooting an Elephant” and “
A Hanging,” classics of expository
prose
.
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Against imperialism
In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the
East End
of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of
Paris
and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the
London
slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields.
Those experiences gave Orwell the material for
Down and Out in Paris and London
, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell’s first novel,
Burmese Days
(1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive,
conscientious
, and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social
environment
. The main character of
Burmese Days
is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and narrow-minded
chauvinism
of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell’s next novel,
A Clergyman’s Daughter
(1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is
reconciled
to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves.
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Orwell’s revulsion against
imperialism
led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle but to a political reorientation as well. Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an
anarchist
and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a
socialist
, though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step?so common in the period?of declaring himself a
communist
.
From
The Road to Wigan Pier
to World War II
Orwell’s first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political
treatise
entitled
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the
destitute
and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp
criticisms
of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing.
By the time
The Road to Wigan Pier
was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the
Civil War
there and stayed to join the Republican militia, serving on the
Aragon
and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel, with damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness. Later, in May 1937, after having fought in
Barcelona
against communists who were trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences,
Homage to Catalonia
(1938), which many consider one of his best books.
Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically
conservative
strain in writing
Coming Up for Air
(1939), in which he uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. When
World War II
did come, Orwell was rejected for
military service
, and instead he headed the Indian service of the
British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of the
Tribune
, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the British Labour leader
Aneurin Bevan
. At this period Orwell was a
prolific
journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious
criticism
, like his classic essays on
Charles Dickens
and on boys’ weeklies and a number of books about England (notably
The Lion and the Unicorn
,
1941) that combined patriotic
sentiment
with the
advocacy
of a
libertarian
, decentralist socialism very much unlike that practiced by the British
Labour Party
.