George
Orwell (1903-1950) was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in
Motihari, Bengal, India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair
was a civil servant for the British government. In 1904 Orwell
moved with his mother and sister to England where he remained
until 1922. He began to write at an early age, and was even
published in college periodicals, but he did not enjoy school.
Orwell wrote about his unfavorable prep-school experiences in
the essay Such Such were the Joys (1968).
Orwell
failed to win a university scholarship and without the
opportunity to continue his education he went to Bruma and
served in the administration of the Indian Imperial Police
from 1922 to 1927 when he resigned in part due to his growing
dislike of British imperialism, a dislike he vocalized in his
essays Shooting an Elephant (1950), and A
Hanging (1931).
When Orwell returned to Europe he
was in poor financial condition and worked low paying jobs in
France and England. Finally, in 1928, he decided to become a
professional writer. Starting in 1930 Orwell became a regular
contributor to the New Adelphi, and in 1933 he assumed the
name "George Orwell" by which he would become famous. For his
first novel he used his recent experience with poverty as
inspiration and wrote Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933). While teaching in a private school he published his
second major work, Burmese Days (1934). Two years later
Orwell married Eileen O'Shaugnessy.
During the1930s
Orwell had adopted the views of a socialist and traveled to
Spain to report on their civil war. He took the side of the
United Workers Marxist Party militia and fought alongside
them, which earned him a wound in the neck. It was this war
that made him hate communism in favor of the English brand of
socialism. Orwell wrote a book on Spain, Homage to
Catalonia, which was published in 1938.
During the
second World War Orwell served as a sergeant in the Home Guard
and also worked as a journalist for the BBC, Observer and
Tribune, where he was literary editor from 1943 to 1945. It
was toward the end of the war that he wrote Animal
Farm, and when it was over he moved to Scotland.
It
was Animal Farm that made finally Orwell prosperous.
His other world wide success was Nineteen Eighty-Four,
which Orwell said was written "to alter other people's idea of
the kind of society they should strive after." Sadly Orwell
never lived to see how successful it would become.
Eileen O'Shaugnessy, Orwell's wife died in 1945 and in
1949 he remarried to a woman named Sonia Browell. Orwell's
second marriage was short-lived however, as he died from
tuberculosis in London on January 21, 1950.
