George Orwell was the pen name of the English author Eric Arthur Blair. Orwell was educated in England at Eton College. After service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927, he returned to Europe to become a writer. He lived for several years in poverty. His earliest experiences resulted in the book Down and Out in Paris and London.

By 1936, Orwell had joined the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. Later he joined the Lenin Division, a unit under the control of the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). Orwell was critical of communism but basically considered himself a socialist. He was wounded in the fighting. Late in the war, 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 he 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. He documented many of his experiences during the Spanish Civil War in his Homage to Catalonia.

Orwell published Coming up for Air in 1939. In August 1941 Orwell began work for the Eastern Service of the BBC. 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. During this period Orwell also worked for the Observer newspaper.

In 1943 Aneurin Bevan (see this is my truth tell me yours), 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.

His wartime work for the BBC gave him a solid taste of bureaucratic hypocrisy. Many believe that this experience provided the inspiration for his invention of "newspeak," the truth-denying language of Big Brother's rule in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: in 1945 he reviewed the anti-Utopian novel We by Yevgeni Zamyatin for Tribune. The book inspired his novel, 1984. 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.

Orwell's various experiences with totalitarian political regimes had a direct impact on his prose. Orwell's best-known books reflect his opposition to totalitarianism: Animal Farm and 1984. In an article entitled, "Why I Write" Orwell would explain:"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism... Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole."Throughout his lifetime he continually questioned all "official" or "accepted" versions of history. At the conclusion of the war in Europe, Orwell expressed doubt about the Allied account of events and posed the following question in his book Notes on Nationalism, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear... Is it true about the gas ovens in Poland?"Orwell died in London at the early age of forty-seven of a neglected lung ailment caused by tuberculosis.see also: big brother
george orwell [persons]
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