Home

Orwell George 1903 - 1950 (47)

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


QUOTES

1984



George Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair, June 25 1903 to January 21, 1950) was a British author and journalist. Born in Motiari, India, his father was an official of the State Administration of India and his mother had English-Indian origins. George was one year old when he returned with his mother and his brothers to England; his father stayed back and saw him again in 1912 when he retired and left India. In 1917 he gain a scholarship for Eton college and in 1921 he enlisted in the imperial guards of India. He was posted in Burma, where he stayed for five years, until he resigned expressing a strong opposition to the institution of colonialism. He then decided to become a writer and to denounce inequality, injustice and corruption. The following two years he was wandering at the streets of Paris and London, doing heavy manual jobs and staying often without food and shelter. He described the marginal life in this dramatic narrative book: "Down and Out in Paris and London", published under the pseudonym "George Orwell" for not embarrassing his middle class family. This nickname eventually lasted for all his books and it was with it that became famous. In his second novel, "Burmese Days" in 1934, Orwell criticizes the colonial rule of Britain and the hypocrisy of the ruling class. In 1936 he met and soon married Eileen O'Shaughnessy who supported him financially so to devote himself undisturbed to writing. In December 1936 he went to Spain in order to write some articles about the Civil War. He very soon took the size of democratic army and fought as a soldier. He received in a battle two bullets in hand and neck and after hospitalization, he returned to England, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Since then he was in and out of sanatoria.

He continued to write books and for the novel "The Road to Wigan Piar" he spent the winter of 1937 alongside the unemployed miners in northern England. In 1938 he recounted his adventures in the Spanish Civil War, in the play "Homage to Catalonia”. He became known and began to cooperate with the progressive newspaper «Tribune» while in 1941 he was provided with a position as a radio producer at BBC. When the Second World War broke, he wanted to join the army but he wasn't allow because of his poor health. In 1944 he adopted a son but the following year his wife died and his little sister undertook the upbringing of the baby. George left as war correspondent for the BBC in India and remained there for three years until he resigned to devote himself to his literary work. He then lived for long periods on the island Jura where he was isolated and calm. In his last years he wrote two books that gave him his great reputation. In 1944 the allegorical novel "Animal Farm", inspired by the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist USSR period with which he became rich and famous and in 1949 released his last project, the famous '1984', which described a nightmarish future world where a totalitarian police state, the big brother, is watching every movement of citizens. George Orwell died in January 1950 in a London hospital. A few days ago, he had married Sonia Brownell, a young publisher who inherited his work and made a career and a fortune managing his books' rights.