George Orwell Essay, Research Paper

As a journalist and writer of autobiographical narratives, George Orwell was outstanding. But he will be remembered primarily for two works of fiction that have become 20th-century classics: ‘Animal Farm’, published in 1944, and ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’ (1949).

George Orwell is a pen name. His real name was Eric Arthur Blair, and he was born in 1903 at Montihari in Bengal, India, where his father was a minor British official. His family had social status but little money, a fact that influenced Orwell’s later attitude toward the English class system and the empire’s treatment of its subject peoples. In about 1911 the family returned to England. Blair was sent to school in Sussex, where he was distinguished both by his poverty and his intelligence. He later wrote of his miserable school years in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ (1953). He attended Eton in the years 1917 to 1921 but decided against going on to a university. Instead he went to Burma (now Myanmar) as a member of the British imperial police.

His own poverty, plus his growing aversion to Britain’s imperial policies, led him to resign from the government in 1928. He then spent several years among the poor and outcast of Europe and among the unemployed miners in the north of England. These experiences were recounted in ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ (1933) and ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ (1937). Then Orwell went to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War. His experiences in Spain were described in ‘Homage to Catalonia’ (1938), one of his best books.

During World War II Orwell wrote for the British Broadcasting Company and worked as a literary editor for the London Tribune. The success of ‘Animal Farm’ in 1944 allowed him to devote himself to writing. He bought a house on the island of Jura, where he wrote ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’. By the time it was published, Orwell was already ill from the tuberculosis from which he died on Jan. 21, 1950, in London.

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Excerpted from Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia

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