Background

Eric Arthur Blair was born on the 15th of June, 1903, in Motihari, Bihar, India into the class of sahibs. He was the son of a minor British official in the Indian civil service, Richard Walmesley Blair and Ida Mabel Blair, of French extraction, who was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Orwell was brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. His mother brought him and his older sister, Marjorie, to England about a year after his birth and settled in Henley-on-Thames. His father stayed behind in India and rarely visited. Orwell didn't really know his father until he retired from the service in 1912. And even after that, the pair never formed a strong bond.

Education

In 1911 George was sent 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 He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953).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.

Career

Orwell 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.

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.

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.

In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. At first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for the small masterpiece, but when it appeared in 1945, Animal Farm made him famous and, for the first time, prosperous. Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. Orwell’s warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book’s title and many of its coined words and phrases ("Big Brother is watching you," "newspeak," "doublethink") became bywords for modern political abuses.

Orwell wrote the last pages of Nineteen Eighty-four in a remote house on the Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds of Animal Farm. He worked between bouts of hospitalization for tuberculosis, of which he died in a London hospital in January 1950.

Achievements

• 

  George Orwell features among the list of the greatest writers of all times. He is best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both these novels are literary masterpieces and are considered as the sharpest satirical fiction of the 20th century. In 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four was honored with the Prometheus Award for the contributions to dystopian literature. In 2011, he received it again for Animal Farm.
  
  Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian" – describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices – is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", and "Hate week", "Room 101", the "memory hole", and "Newspeak", "doublethink" and "proles", "unperson" and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell second among "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • 1984

    (George Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world dominate...)

    1949
  • Down and Out in Paris and London

    (This unusual fictional account, in good part autobiograph...)

    1933
  • Homage to Catalonia

    (In 1936, originally intending merely to report on the Spa...)

    1938
  • A Clergyman's Daughter

    (Dorothy Hare, the dutiful daughter of a rector in Suffolk...)

    1935
  • A Collection of Essays

    (One of the most thought-provoking and vivid essayists of ...)

    1970
  • Coming Up for Air

    (George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle...)

    1939
  • Keep the Aspidistra Flying

    (Gordon Comstock is a poor young man who works in a grubby...)

    1936
  • Animal Farm

    (George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novel - a...)

    1945
  • The Road to Wigan Pier

    (In the 1930s Orwell was sent by a socialist book club to ...)

    1937
  • Burmese Days

    (Orwell draws on his years of experience in India to tell ...)

    1934

Religion

George Orwell was not commonly considered as a religious man. His position to religion has been characterized in various terms, as an agnostic, humanist, secular saint or even Christian atheist. His final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a tale of grim despair, hardly a message to cheer the true believer. It is both sadistic and nihilistic. And even in his famous fairy tale, Animal Farm, religion is represented cynically as lies put about by Moses the tame Raven about a supposed animal paradise. In another novel (A Clergyman’s Daughter) he has a Satanic unfrocked priest reciting The Lord’s Prayer backward while holding an inverted crucifix.

Politics

In his Adelphi days he described himself as a "Tory-anarchist." When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he joined the Independent Labour Party, his card being issued on 13 June 1938. His experiences in Spain had made him into a revolutionary socialist.

Views

Orwell disliked what he thought as misguided middle-class revolutionary emancipatory views, expressing disdain for "every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniacs." He was also openly against homosexuality, at a time when such prejudice was common. George used the homophobic epithets "nancy" and "pansy", notably in his expressions of contempt for what he called the "pansy Left", and "nancy poets", i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden.

Quotations: "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

"Four legs good, two legs bad."

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

Personality

George Orwell was captivating and thoughtful, thanks partly to the wealth of experience he had acquired. He was generous to friends and strangers alike but was generally pessimistic about himself, his writing, and the future.

George Orwell was a prankster. Blair was expelled from his crammer school for sending a birthday message attached to a dead rat to the town surveyor, according to Sir Bernard Crick's George Orwell: A Life, the first complete biography of Orwell. And while studying at Eton College, Orwell made up a song about John Crace, his school’s housemaster, in which he made fun of Crace’s appearance and penchant for Italian art. Later, in a newspaper column, he recalled his boyhood hobby of replying to advertisements and stringing the salesmen along as a joke. He said that you can have a lot of fun by answering the advertisements and then, when you have drawn them out and made them waste a lot of stamps in sending successive wads of testimonials, suddenly leaving them cold.

Physical Characteristics: Hair color - brown

Eyes color - blue

Quotes from others about the person

• "I often feel I will never pick up a book by Orwell again until I have read a frank discussion of the dishonesty and hysteria that mar some of his best work." - Kingsley Amis
  
  "He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry. This habit of mind informed everything he wrote. Animal Farm and 1984 are political novels, Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier and all his essays ask a cui bono and try to unseat the profit-makers, whoever they be. This ruling purpose is the secret of his best writing but far too evident in his worst. If we look dispassionately at his achievement, we notice the enormous preponderance of journalism in these four volumes." - Cyril Connolly
  
  "What struck me in Orwell was his lack of historical sense and of psychological insight into political life, coupled with an acute, though narrow, penetration into some aspects of politics, and with an incorruptible firmness of opinion." - Isaac Deutscher
  
  "Toward the end of his life he did … become a kind of Tory anarchist - as he once described himself … or even Tory socialist, someone, that is, who, though without exercising double-think, managed to fuse conservative ideas (about patriotism, for example) with radical ones (about the equitable distribution of wealth, for example)." - Peter Edgerly Firchow
  
  "The Spanish Civil War shaped the political consciousness of a whole generation, which overwhelmingly saw it as representing heroic resistance to Fascism. Goldman and J. C. Powys did not belong to that generation – they belonged to the generation of its parents or, even, grandparents. And rather than resistance to Fascism, it was the social achievements of the Spanish Revolution that inspired them. In that they stand alone, among figures of the front rank, with Read and Orwell (and it will be seen how he and Homage to Catalonia fared, on the left at least, his reputation only taking off when Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were taken up as being anti-Soviet at the onset of the Cold War)." - David Goodway

Interests

• Natural history, ornithology, fishing, shooting rabbits

Connections

Orwell married Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1936. The marriage was open and Orwell had a number of affairs with other women. In June 1944, Orwell and Eileen adopted a three-week-old boy they named Richard Horatio. According to Richard, Orwell was a wonderful father who gave him devoted, if rather rugged, attention and a great degree of freedom. After Orwell's death Richard went to live with Orwell's sister and her husband. Eileen died in 1945.

Blair was very lonely after Eileen's death in 1945, and desperate for a wife, both as a companion for himself and as a mother for Richard. He proposed marriage to four women, including Celia Kirwan, and eventually Sonia Brownell accepted. Orwell had met her when she was assistant to Cyril Connolly, at Horizon literary magazine. They were married on 13 October 1949, only three months before Orwell's death.

Father:

Richard Walmsley Blair

(1857 - 1939)

Mother:

Ida Mabel Limouzin

(1875 - 1943)

late wife:

Eileen O'Shaughnessy

(25 September 1905 – 29 March 1945)

Eileen O'Shaughnessy was the first wife of George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair).

Wife:

Sonia Brownell

(25 August 1918 – 11 December 1980)

Sonia Brownell was the second and last wife of writer George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair. Sonia is believed to be the model for Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sister:

Avril Blair

Sister:

Marjorie Blair

Son:

Richard Blair

(born May 1944)

Friend:

Jacintha Buddicom

(10 May 1901 – 4 November 1993)

Jacintha Buddicom was a poet and a childhood friend of George Orwell (Eric Blair). She met Blair in 1914 and they developed a shared interest in poetry, but she lost touch with him after he departed for Burma in 1922, and later she disputed Blair's writings about his own childhood. She considered it "impertinent" of Orwell to have volunteered in the Spanish Civil War. The two were in contact again near the end of Blair's life. She gave an account of the relationship in her memoir Eric & Us, published in 1974.

Friend:

Brenda Salkeld

Brenda Salkeld was the clergyman's daughter who worked as a gym-teacher at St Felix Girls' School in the town. Although Salkeld rejected George Orwell's offer of marriage, she remained a friend and regular correspondent for many years.

Friend:

Richard Rees

(4 April 1900 – 24 July 1970)

Sir Richard Lodowick Edward Montagu Rees, 2nd Bt was a British diplomat, writer and painter.

Friend:

Tosco R. Fyvel

(1907 – 22 June 1985)

Tosco R. Fyvel was an author, journalist and literary editor. A Zionist, in 1936-7, he worked with Golda Meir in Palestine.

References

• George Orwell: A Life The first and only authorized biography of George Orwell, written with the cooperation of Orwell's widow, relates the private facts of the political writer's life to the substance of his writing.
  1980
• Why Orwell Matters In this widely acclaimed biographical essay, the masterful polemicist Christopher Hitchens assesses the life, the achievements, and the myth of the great political writer and participant George Orwell. True to his contrarian style, Hitchens is both admiring and aggressive, sympathetic yet critical, taking true measure of his subject as hero and problem.
  2002
• Orwell: The Authorized Biography Traces Orwell's life and career, describing his school days, his experiences in the Spanish Civil War and as a police superintendent in Burma, the development of his writing, and his place in literary history.
  1991
• The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984 An authoritative, wide-ranging, and incredibly timely history of 1984, its literary sources, its composition by Orwell, its deep and lasting effect on the Cold War, and its vast influence throughout world culture at every level, from high to pop.
  2019
• George Orwell: English Rebel An intellectual who did not like intellectuals, a socialist who did not trust the state, a writer of the left who found it easier to forgive writers of the right, a liberal who was against free markets, a Protestant who believed in religion but not in God, a fierce opponent of nationalism who defined Englishness for a generation.
  2013