George Orwell Biography and List of Works

English novelist, essayist and critic, famous for his novels ANIMAL FARM (1945) and NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), both classics of political satire. Although Orwell expressed leftist views, he remained an uncompromising individualist and political idealist until the end of his life, and was called the conscience of the age by his contemporaries.

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, than one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push ascetism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."
(from 'Reflections on Gandhi', in Shooting an Elephant, 1949)

George Orwell was born in Motihari, Bengal, India, the second child of Richard Walmesley Blair and Ida Mabel Limonzin. His father was a civil servant in the opium department and his mother came from a family of old Burma hands. In 1904 Orwell moved to England with his mother and sister. He attended Eton and published his first writings in college periodicals. During these years Orwell developed his antipathy towards the English class systems. Orwell's years at St Cyprian's Preparatory School were likewise not happy. His bitter essay dealing with this period, SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS, was not published until 1968.

Orwell failed to win a scholarship to university thus in 1922 he went to Burma to serve in the Indian Imperial Police (1922-27) as an assistant superintendent. Eventually Orwell's mounting dislike of imperialism led to his resignation. His revelations of the behaviour of the colonial officers appeared in SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1950) and in his early essay A Hanging (1931).

Orwell returned to Europe and lived as a tramp and beggar, working in low paid jobs in England and France (1928-29). In 1928 he decided to become a writer. Orwell's experiences of poverty became the basis for DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON (1933). From 1930 Orwell contributed regularly to the New Adelphi and in 1933 he assumed the pseudonym by which he would sign all his publications. Unable to support himself with his writings, Orwell took up a teaching post at a private school, where he finished his first novel, BURMESE DAYS (1934). In 1936 Orwell married Eileen O'Shaugnessy. KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING, the story of a young bookseller's assistant, appeared in 1936. From 1936 to 1940 Orwell worked as a shopkeeper in Wallingford, Hertfordshire. In 1936 Orwell was commissioned by the publisher Victor Gollancz to produce a documentary account of unemployment in the North of England for the Left Book Club. The result, THE ROAD TO WIGAN'S PEER, is considered a milestone in modern literary journalism.

In the1930s Orwell had adopted socialist views and travelled to Spain to report on the Civil War. He fought alongside the United Workers Marxist Party militia and was wounded in the neck. The war made him a strongly opposed to communism and an advocate of the English brand of socialism. Orwell's book on Spain, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, appeared in 1938.

During World War II Orwell served as a sergeant in the Home Guard and worked as a journalist for the BBC, Observer and Tribune, where he was literary editor from 1943 to 1945. Toward the end of the war he wrote Animal Farm, which depicted the betrayal of a revolution. After the war Orwell lived mostly in Jura in the Western Isles of Scotland.

The biting satire of Communist ideology in Animal Farm made Orwell prosperous for the first time in his life. His other world wide success was Nineteen Eighty-Four, now considered one of the classic works of science fiction along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and H.G. Wells novels The Time Machine, War of The Worlds and The Invisible Man. 1984 was a bitter protest against the nightmarish direction in which the author believed the modern world was moving. In the story, Britannia has become Airstrip One in the super state Oceania, which is ruled by the head of the Party, Big Brother. The Party's agents constantly rewrite history. The official language is Newspeak, and society is dominated by such slogans, as "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "and Ignorance is Strength." Orwell shows that the destruction of language is part of all other destructive social aims. The hero, Winston Smith, a minor Party operative, keeps a secret diary and has a brief love affair with a girl named Julia. He is arrested by the Thought Police, tortured and brainwashed. His spirit broken, Winston finally learns to love Big Brother. Some critics have related Smith's sufferings to those the author underwent at preparatory school. Orwell has said that the book was written, "to alter other people's idea of the kind of society they should strive after."

Orwell's wife died in 1945 and in 1949 he married Sonia Browell. Orwell died from tuberculosis in London on January 21, 1950, soon after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 1998 Martin Seymour-Smith listed Orwell's dystopia among the 100 most influential books ever written. Orwell himself implicitly acknowledge his debt to Evgeny Zamyatin's (1884-1937) novel We (in Russia My), which was written in 1920 and translated into English 1924.

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power."
(from Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Although Orwell is best known as a novelist, his essays are among the finest written in the 20th-century. He also produced newspaper articles and reviews, which were written for money, but he carefully crafted his other essays for such journals as Partisan Review, Adelphi and Horizon. Orwell united political purpose and literary ambitions into a sharp analysis of bureaucratic institutions and cultural elites. Without hesitation he denounced Yeats as a fascist. H.G. Wells was out of touch with reality, Salvador Dali he found decadent, but defended P.G. Wodehouse and rehabilitated Kilping. In 'Why Write?' and 'Politics and the English Language' (1948) Orwell argued that writers have an obligation to fight social injustice, oppression, and the power of totalitarian regimes. Orwell's view of class-bounded language has had a deep effect on the political discourse of our time.

Animal Farm (1945) - satirical allegory of the Russian Revolution, particularly directed against Stalin's Russia. Led by the pigs, the Animals on Mr Jones's farm revolt against their human masters. After their victory they decide to run the farm themselves on egalitarian principles. Inspired by the example of Boxer, the hard-working horse, the cooperation prospers. Eventually the pigs become corrupted by power and a new tyranny is established under Napoleon (Stalin). 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.' Snowball (Trotsky), an idealist, is driven out. The final betrayal is made when the pigs engineer a rapprochement with Mr Jones. The book was originally rejected for publication by T.S. Eliot in 1944, but has since gained the status of a classic. - The film adaptation from 1955 was a faithful rendition of Orwell's original work that watered the satire, and presented a socialist viewpoint: the system is good, but the individuals are corruptible.

For further reading: George Orwell by L. Brander (1954); The Crystal Spirit by G. Woodcock (1966); Orwell by Raymond Williams (1971); The Unknown Orwell by Peter Stansky (1972); Road to Miniluv by C. Small (1975); A Reader's Guide to George Orwell, ed. by Jeffrey Meyers (1975); George Orwell: A Life by B. Crick (1981); A George Orwell Companion by J.R. Hammond (1982); George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Jeffrey Meyers; The Language of 1984 by W.F. Bolton (1984); Orwell by Michel Shelden (1991) - See also: Franz Kafka - OTHER WRITERS WITTNESSING THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR: Ernest Hemingway, Federico Garcia Lorca, André Malraux, Langston Hughes.

Books by George Orwell