George Orwell
1903–1950 12 entries
Biography
George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was an English writer and journalist known for his clear prose and his opposition to tyranny. He was born in 1903 in Motihari, in British India, went to school at Eton and served five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that turned him against empire. Back in Europe he lived among the poor and wrote about it in Down and Out in Paris and London, and in 1936 he went to Spain to fight against Franco, where he was shot through the throat.
The Spanish Civil War, which he described in Homage to Catalonia, made him a lifelong enemy of totalitarianism, fascist and Stalinist alike. In 1945 he published Animal Farm, a fable of a revolution betrayed, and in 1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose Big Brother, Thought Police and Newspeak have entered everyday language. He also wrote essays such as Politics and the English Language, a lesson in honest writing still read today. He died of tuberculosis in London in January 1950, at forty-six.
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