George Orwell

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal Presidency, in British India. He died on 21 January 1950. Orwell wrote in a clear, direct style that made difficult political and moral questions feel close to ordinary life. His work is marked by social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism in both authoritarian communism and fascism, and support for democratic socialism.

Orwell came from a family he described as “lower-upper-middle class.” His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, while his mother, Ida Mabel Blair, had grown up in Moulmein, Burma. When Orwell was one year old, his mother took him and his older sister Marjorie to England. He was raised largely with his mother and sisters, first at Henley-on-Thames, and later attended St Cyprian’s School, Wellington, and Eton. At St Cyprian’s he became aware that he came from a poorer home than many around him, an experience he later drew on in the essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” published after his death.

In 1922, after leaving Eton and passing the entrance examination, Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He chose Burma in part because his maternal grandmother lived at Moulmein. He sailed from England in October, arrived at Rangoon a month later, and trained at Mandalay before being appointed an Assistant District Superintendent on probation. That early adult life placed him inside the structures of empire, while his later writing would be known for its plain suspicion of power, official language, and political control.

Orwell is best known for Animal Farm, published in 1945, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. The first is an allegorical novella, the second a dystopian novel. Yet his range was wider than those two books. His non-fiction includes The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), drawn from his experience of working-class life in industrial Northern England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his time soldiering for the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War. His essays on politics, literature, language, and culture are also central to his reputation.

Many of the words and images Orwell gave to readers have passed into common use. “Orwellian” now describes totalitarian and authoritarian social practices, and terms from his fiction such as “Big Brother,” “Thought Police,” “Room 101,” “Newspeak,” “memory hole,” “doublethink,” and “thoughtcrime” remain part of the English language. In 2008, The Times named him the second-greatest British writer since 1945. His words still resonate because they are alert to the ways public life can distort private truth, and because his prose tries, again and again, to make things clear.