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Early life
Eric Blair was born on June 25, 1903 to an Anglo-Indian family in Motihari, Bihar, in India, during the period when India was part of the British Empire under the British Raj. There Blair's father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked for the opium department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair, brought him to Britain at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie, and a younger sister named Avril. He would later describe his family's background as "lower-upper-middle class."
Education
At the age of six, Blair was sent to a small Anglican parish school in Henley-on-Thames, which his sister had attended before him. He never wrote of his recollections of it, but he must have impressed the teachers very favourably, for two years later he was recommended to the headmaster of one of the most successful preparatory schools in England at the time: St Cyprian's School, in Eastbourne, Sussex. Blair attended St Cyprian's on a scholarship that allowed his parents to pay only half of the usual fees. Many years later, he would recall his time at St Cyprian's with biting resentment in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys", describing the stifling limits placed on his development by the Warden. "They [the officials] were my benefactors", writes Orwell, "sacrificing financial gain in order that the cleverest might bring academic accolades to the school". "Our brains were a gold-mine in which he [the Warden] had sunk money, and the dividends must be squeezed out of us". However, in his time at St Cyprians, the young Blair successfully earned scholarships to both Wellington College and Eton College.
After some time at Wellington, Blair moved to Eton, where he was a King's Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Later in life he wrote that he had been "relatively happy" at Eton, which allowed its students considerable independence, but also that he ceased doing serious work after arriving there. Reports of his academic performance at Eton vary; some assert that he was a poor student, while others claim the contrary. He was clearly disliked by some of his teachers, who resented what they perceived as disrespect for their authority. During his time at the school, Blair made lifetime friendships with a number of future British intellectuals such as Cyril Connolly, the future editor of the Horizon magazine, in which many of Orwell's most famous essays were originally published.
Burma and the early novels
After Blair finished his studies at Eton, his family could not pay for university and he had no prospect of a scholarship. So in 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He came to hate imperialism, returned to England in 1927 and resigned, determined to become a writer. He later used his Burmese experiences for the novel Burmese Days (1934) and in such essays as "A Hanging" (1931), and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936).
In 1928, he moved to Paris, where his aunt lived, hoping to make a living as a freelance writer. But his lack of success forced him into menial jobs – which he later described in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), although there is no indication that he had the book in mind at the time.
Ill and broke, he moved back to England in 1929, using his parents' house in Southwold, Suffolk, as a base. Writing what became Burmese Days, he made frequent forays into tramping as part of what had by now become a book project on the life of the underclass. Meanwhile, he became a regular contributor to John Middleton Murry's New Adelphi magazine.
Blair completed Down and Out in 1932, and it was published early the next year while he was working briefly as a schoolteacher at a private school in Hayes, Middlesex. Blair became George Orwell just before Down and Out was published, adopting the pen-name of George Orwell. It is unknown exactly why he chose this name. He knew and liked the River Orwell in Suffolk and apparently found the plainness of the first name George attractive. Some believe that he chose George since it is the name of the Saint George.
Orwell drew on his teaching experiences for the novel A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), which he wrote at his parents' place in 1934 after ill-health forced him to give up teaching. From late 1934 to early 1936 he worked part-time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, an experience later partially recounted in the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
The Road to Wigan Pier In early 1936, Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz of the Left Book Club to write an account of life in the depressed areas of northern England, which appeared in 1937 as The Road to Wigan Pier.
Soon after completing his research for the book, Orwell married Eileen O'Shaughnessy.
The Spanish Civil War and Homage to Catalonia
In December 1936, Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco's Nationalist uprising. He went as part of the Independent Labour Party contingent, a group of some 25 Britons who joined the militia of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), a revolutionary socialist party with which the ILP was allied. The POUM, along with the radical wing of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (the dominant force on the left in Catalonia), believed that Franco could be defeated only if the working class in the Republic overthrew capitalism — a position fundamentally at odds with that of the Spanish Communist Party and its allies, which (backed by Soviet arms and aid) argued for a coalition with bourgeois parties to defeat the Nationalists. By his own admission, Orwell joined the POUM rather than the communist-run International Brigades by chance — but his experiences, in particular his witnessing the communist suppression of the POUM in May 1937, made him sympathetic towards the POUM line and turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist. During his military service, Orwell was shot through the neck and was lucky to survive. His book Homage to Catalonia describes his experiences in Spain. To recuperate from his injuries, he spent six months in Morocco, described in his essay 'Marrakech'.
The second world war and Animal Farm
Back in Britain, Orwell supported himself by writing freelance reviews, mainly for the New English Weekly (until he broke with it over its pacifism in 1940) and then mostly for Time and Tide. He joined the Home Guard soon after the war began (and was later awarded the Defence medal).
In 1941 Orwell took a job at the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot."
Despite the good pay, he resigned in 1943 to become literary editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly then edited by Aneurin Bevan and Jon Kimche. Orwell was on the staff until early 1945, contributing a regular column titled "As I Please."
In 1944, Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great critical and popular success. The royalties from Animal Farm were to provide Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life.
While Animal Farm was at the printer, Orwell left Tribune to become (briefly) a war correspondent for Observer. He was a close friend of the Observer's editor/owner, David Astor, and his ideas had a strong influence on Astor's editorial policies. (Astor, who died in 2001, is buried in the grave next to Orwell.)
The road to Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell returned from Europe in spring 1945, shortly after the death during an operation of his wife Eileen (with whom he had recently adopted a baby boy, Richard Horatio Blair, who was born in May 1944).
For the next three years Orwell mixed journalistic work — mainly for Tribune, the Observer and the Manchester Evening News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines — with writing his best-known work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949.
He wrote much of the novel while living in a remote farmhouse on the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland, to which he moved in 1946 despite increasingly bad health.
In 1949, Orwell was approached by a friend, Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, which had been set up by the Labour government to publish pro-democratic and anti-communist propaganda. He gave her a list of 37 writers and artists he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. The list, not published until 2003, consists mainly of journalists (among them the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin) but also includes the actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin. Orwell's motives for handing over the list are unclear, but the most likely explanation is the simplest: that he was helping out a friend in a cause — anti-Stalinism — that they both supported. There is no indication that Orwell ever abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings — or that he believed the writers he named should be suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all, at one time or another, made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements.
In October 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell. Orwell died in London at the age of 46 from tuberculosis, which he had probably contracted during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial in accordance with the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th, 1903, died January 21st, 1950.
Orwell's adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair, was raised by an aunt after his father's death. He maintains a low public profile, though he has occasionally given interviews about the few memories he has of his father. Blair worked for many years as an agricultural agent for the British government, and had no interest in writing.
Political views
Orwell's political views changed over time, but there can be no doubt that he was a man of the left throughout his life as a writer. His time in Burma made him a staunch opponent of imperialism, and his experience of poverty while researching Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier turned him into a socialist. "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it," he wrote in 1946.
It was Spain, however, that played the most important part in defining his socialism. Having witnessed at first hand the suppression of the revolutionary left by the Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined the Independent Labour Party.
At the time, like most other left-wingers in Britain, he was still opposed to rearmament against Hitlerite Germany — but after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the outbreak of the second world war, he changed his mind. He left the ILP over its pacifism and adopted a political position of "revolutionary patriotism". He supported the war effort but detected (wrongly as it turned out) a mood that would lead to a revolutionary socialist movement among the British people. "We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary," he wrote in Tribune, the Labour left's weekly, in December 1940.
By 1943, his thinking had moved on. He joined the staff of Tribune as literary editor, and from then until his death was a left-wing (though hardly orthodox) democratic socialist. He canvassed for the Labour Party in the 1945 general election and was broadly supportive of its actions in office, though he was sharply critical of its timidity on certain key questions and was also harshly critical of the pro-Soviet stance of many Labour left-wingers.
Although he was never either a Trotskyist or an anarchist, he was strongly influenced by the Trotskyist and anarchist critiques of the Soviet regime and by the anarchists' emphasis on individual freedom. Many of his closest friends in the mid-1940s were part of the small anarchist scene in London.
Legacy
During most of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism, in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living conditions of poor miners in northern England) and Homage to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil War). According to Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt."
Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism.
Influence on the English language
Nineteen Eighty-Four has given the English language the phrase 'Big Brother', or 'Big Brother is watching you'. This is used to refer to any oppressive regime, but particularly in the context of invasion of privacy. The TV series 'Big Brother' is named after this phrase.
The adjective Orwellian is mainly derived from the system depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It can refer to any form of government oppression, but it is particularly used to refer to euphemistic and misleading language originating from government bodies with a political purpose, for example 'friendly fire', 'collateral damage' and 'pacification'.
Variations of the slogan "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others", from Animal Farm, are sometimes used to satirise situations where equality exists in theory and rhetoric but not in practice. For example, an allegation that rich people are treated more leniently by the courts despite legal equality before the law might be summarised as "all criminals are equal, but some are more equal than others".
The term "cold war" goes back centuries. Orwell used it in an essay titled "You and the Atomic Bomb" on October 19, 1945 in Tribune, he wrote:
"We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — this is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours."
Literary influences
Orwell claimed that his writing style was most similar to that of Somerset Maugham. In his literary essays, he also strongly praised the works of Jack London, especially his book "The Road." Orwell's descent into the lives of the poor, in "The Road to Wigan Pier," strongly resembles that of Jack London's "The People of the Abyss," in which London disguises himself as a poverty stricken American sailor in order to investigate the lives of the poor in London. In his literary essays, George Orwell also praised Charles Dickens, "Tropic of Cancer" author Henry Miller and Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick. Another of his favourite authors was Jonathan Swift, and, in particular, his book Gulliver's Travels.
Trivia
Aldous Huxley was Orwell's French teacher for a term early in his Eton career.
His wife Eileen was once a student of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Despite being remembered for his radio broadcasts for the BBC during the war no recording of Orwell speaking was known until 2002. The only known film footage of Orwell is from him at Eton playing the Eton Wall Game.
Orwell had an NKVD file — partly due to his anti-Stalinist Animal Farm. Before settling on "George Orwell", Eric Blair had considered using the pseduonyms "P.S. Burton," "Kenneth Miles," and "H. Lewis Allways".

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Harold Laski, British socialist and political theorist. Banned from speaking at the University of California at Los Angeles for his views. Kingsley Martin once observed "His lectures amounted to little in substance if one tried to write them down, but they made every student excited about the subject." Laski's press, the Left Book Club, published Orwell's 1937 book, The Road To Wigan Pier.

Historically, at times of national stress -- real or imagined -- First Amendment rights come under enormous pressure. During the "Red Scare" of the early 1920s, thousands were deported for their political views. During the McCarthy period, the infamous blacklist ruined lives and careers.

Today, the creators, producers and distributers of popular culture are often blamed for the nation’s deep social problems. Calls for censorship threaten to erode free speech.

The First Amendment exists precisely to protect the most offensive and controversial speech from government suppression. The best way to counter obnoxious speech is with more speech. Persuasion, not coercion, is the solution.

Orwell claimed that his writing style was most similar to that of Somerset Maugham.

In his literary essays, he also strongly praised the works of Jack London, especially his book "The Road." Orwell's descent into the lives of the poor, in "The Road to Wigan Pier," strongly resembles that of Jack London's "The People of the Abyss," in which London disguises himself as a poverty stricken American sailor in order to investigate the lives of the poor in London.

Another of his favourite authors was Jonathan Swift, and, in particular, his book Gulliver's Travels, which he rated as one of the six greatest books ever written

James Burnham (1905–1987) was an American popular political theorist, activist and intellectual, known for his work The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, which heavily influenced George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four".

Books:


Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Down and Out in Paris and London is George Orwell's personal account of living in poverty in both cities. It begins in Paris, where Orwell lived for two years, surviving by giving English lessons and contributing reviews and articles to various periodicals. Two years later, Orwell moved to London, where, along with writing and tutoring, he worked as a bookshop assistant, an experience which was to inform his later novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. It was first published in 1933.
Burmese Days (1934)
Burmese Days is a novel by British writer George Orwell. Published in 1934 and based loosely on Orwell's five years as a policeman in the Indian Imperial Police force in Burma (now Myanmar), it is a caustic, fast-paced tale about the waning days of British imperialism before World War II. It has been favourably compared with similar works by other between-the-wars British novelists such as Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham.
A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)
A Clergyman's Daughter is a novel by George Orwell. It is probably Orwell's least read novel. It details the trials and tribulation of Dorothy Hare, a young woman whose sad existence, devoted to 'good works' is turned upside down. She lives with her father, a local clergyman, and acts as his unpaid servant in all matters both domestic and professional.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (first published 1936) is a novel by George Orwell. It is set in 1930s London and the surrounding countryside.Keep the Aspidistra Flying was filmed in 1997 (released in the USA under the alternative title of A Merry War) by Robert Bierman based on a screenplay by Alan Plater and starring Richard E. Grant and Helena Bonham Carter.
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
The Road to Wigan Pier was written by George Orwell and published in 1937. It is a sociological look at living conditions in the industrial north of England before World War II that was commissioned by the Left Book club in 1936.
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's personal account of the Spanish Civil War, written in the first person. The first edition was published in 1938. Orwell was in Catalonia from December 1936 to June 1937.
Coming Up for Air (1939)
Coming Up for Air is a novel by George Orwell, published before World War II and predicting that conflict. It is written in the first person, with George Bowling, the 45-year-old protagonist, telling the reader his life story.
Animal Farm (1945)
Animal Farm is a satirical novel (which can also be understood as a modern fable or allegory) by George Orwell, ostensibly about a group of animals who oust the humans from the farm they live on and run it themselves, only to have it corrupted into a brutal tyranny on its own. It was written during World War II and published in 1945, although it was not widely successful until the late 1950s.
Animal Farm is a thinly veiled critique and satire of Soviet totalitarianism. Many events in the book are based on events from the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. (For example, the character Snowball, who is expelled from the Farm by Napoleon, is clearly modeled on Trotsky.) George Orwell, though a leftist – he was for many years a member of the Independent Labour Party – was a critic of Stalin, and suspicious of Moscow-directed communism after his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (or 1984) is an allegorical political novel written by George Orwell. The story takes place in a nightmarish dystopia where the omnipresent State enforces perfect conformity among members of a totalitarian Party through indoctrination, propaganda, fear, and ruthless punishment. The novel introduced the concepts of the ever-present, all-seeing Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police, and the bureaucrats' and politicians' language of control, Newspeak. Some commentators have drawn parallels between today's society and the world of 1984, suggesting that we are starting to live in what has become known as Orwellian society. The novel was successful in terms of sales, and has remained one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
Along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Ayn Rand's world in her novelette, Anthem, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the first and most cited works of dystopian fiction to have appeared in English literature. The book has been translated into many languages. Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a byword in discussions of privacy issues. The term "Orwellian" has come to describe actions or organizations that are thought to be reminiscent of the society depicted in the novel.