George orwell brief biography

()

Who Was George Orwell?

George Orwell was a novelist, essayist and critic best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism.

Early Life

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, India, on June 25, The son of a British civil servant, Orwell spent his first days in India, where his father was stationed. 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. (His younger sister, Avril, was born in Orwell didn't really know his father until he retired from the service in And even after that, the pair never formed a strong bond. He found his father to be dull and conservative.

According to one biography, Orwell's first word was "beastly." He was a sick child, often battling bronchitis and the flu.

Orwell took up writing at an early age, reportedly composing his first poem around age four. He later wrote, "I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued." One of his first literary successes came at the age of 11 when he had a poem published in the local newspaper.

Education

Like many other boys in England, Orwell was sent to boarding school. In , he went to St. Cyprian's in the coastal town of Eastbourne, where he got his first taste of England's class system.

On a partial scholarship, Orwell noticed that the school treated the richer students better than the poorer ones. He wasn't popular with his peers, and in books, he found comfort from his difficult situation. He read works by Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells, among others.

What he lacked in personality, h

“My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”

George Orwell, Why I Write

George Orwell is one of the world&#;s most influential writers, the visionary author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four and eyewitness, non-fiction classics Down and Out in Paris in London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.

George Orwell was born Eric Blair in India in into a comfortable ‘lower-upper-middle class’ family. Orwell&#;s father had served the British Empire, and Orwell’s own first job was as a policeman in Burma. Orwell wrote in “Shooting an Elephant” () that his time in the police force had shown him the “dirty work of Empire at close quarters”; the experience made him a lifelong foe of imperialism.

By the time of his death in , he was world-renowned as a journalist and author: for his eyewitness reporting on war (shot in the neck in Spain) and poverty (tramping in London, washing dishes in Paris or visiting pits and the poor in Wigan); for his political and cultural commentary, where he stood up to power and said the unsayable (‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’); and for his fiction, including two of the most popular novels ever written: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Orwell Foundation maintains a wealth of Orwell resources, free to access online, from Orwell&#;s essays and diaries, to a library of work about Orwell and his writing. Read on for an extended biography written by D.J. Taylor. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. His Biograp

George Orwell  ©Orwell was a British journalist and author, who wrote two of the most famous novels of the 20th century 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. He was educated in England and, after he left Eton, joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. He resigned in and decided to become a writer. In , he moved to Paris where lack of success as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs. He described his experiences in his first book, 'Down and Out in Paris and London', published in He took the name George Orwell, shortly before its publication. This was followed by his first novel, 'Burmese Days', in

An anarchist in the late s, by the s he had begun to consider himself a socialist. In , he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in northern England, which resulted in 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (). Late in , Orwell travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist.

Between and , Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In , he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. By now he was a prolific journalist, writing articles, reviews and books.

In , Orwell's 'Animal Farm' was published. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell's name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was published four years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with its title and many phrases - such as 'Big Brother is watching you', 'newspeak' and 'doublethink' - entering popular use. By

George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, and critic most famous for his novels Animal Farm () and Nineteen Eighty-Four ().

The following biography was written by D.J. Taylor. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. His biography, Orwell: The Life won the Whitbread Biography Award. His new biography, Orwell: The New Life was published in D.J. Taylor is a member of the Orwell Council.

The Orwell Foundation is a registered charity. If you value these resources, please consider becoming a Friend or Patron or making a donation to support our work. You can find more work about Orwell in our library.

Orwell: A (Brief) Life, by D.J. Taylor

GEORGE ORWELL, the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born on 25 June in Motihari, Bengal, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was working as an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service, into what – with the uncanny precision he brought to all social judgments – he described as ‘the lower-upper-middle classes’. In fact the Blairs were remote descendants of the Fane Earls of Westmoreland. Like many a child of the Raj, Orwell was swiftly returned to England and brought up almost exclusively by his mother. The Thames Valley locales in which the family settled provided the background to his novel Coming Up For Air ().

Happily for the family finances – never flourishing – Orwell was a studious child. From St Cyprian’s preparatory school in Eastbourne, a legendary establishment that also educated Cyril Connolly and Cecil Beaton, he won a King’s Scholarship to Eton College, arriving at the school in May Orwell left a caustic memoir of his time at St Cyprian’s (‘Such, Such Were The Joys’) but also remarked that ‘No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.’ At Eton he frankly slacked, leaving the school in December after only a term in the sixth form. The following June he passed the entrance examination of the Indian Imperial Police and was accepted