short biography george orwell

George Orwell

• Literature Notes
• George Orwell Biography
• 1984 at a Glance
• Book Summary
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Part 1: Chapter 1
• Part 1: Chapter 2
• Part 1: Chapter 3
• Part 1: Chapter 4
• Part 1: Chapter 5
• Part 1: Chapters 6-7
• Part 1: Chapter 8
• Part 2: Chapter 1
• Part 2: Chapters 2-3
• Part 2: Chapter 4
• Part 2: Chapters 5-6
• Part 2: Chapters 7-8
• Part 2: Chapters 9-10
• Part 3: Chapter 1
• Part 3: Chapters 2-3
• Part 3: Chapters 4-5
• Part 3: Chapter 6
• Part 3: Appendix
• Character Analysis
• Winston Smith
• Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein
• Character Map
• Critical Essays
• The Role of Language and the Act of Writing
• The Purpose of Newspeak
• The Role of the Author
• The Mutability of History
• Full Glossary
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Early Years

George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India, during the time of the British colonial rule. Young Orwell was brought to England by his mother and educated in Henley and Sussex at schools.

The Orwell family was not wealthy, and, in reading Orwell's personal essays about his childhood, readers can easily see that his formative years were less than satisfying. However, the young Orwell had a gift for writing, which he recognized at the age of just five or six. Orwell's first published work, the poem "Awake Young Men of England," was printed in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard when he was eleven years old.

Orwell attended Eton College. Because literature was not an accepted subject for boys at the time, Orwell studied the master writers and began to develop his own writing style. At Eton, he came into contact with liberalist and socialist ideals, and it was here that his initial political views were formed.

Adult Years

Orwell moved to Burma in 1922, where he served as an Assistant Superintendent of Police for five years before he resigned because of his growing dislike for British Imperialism. In 1928, Orwell moved to Paris and began a series of low paying jobs. In 1929, he moved to London, again living in what he termed "fairly severe poverty." These experiences provided the material for his first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London, which he placed with a publisher in 1933.

About this time, while Orwell was teaching in a small private school in Middlesex, he came down with his first bout of pneumonia due to tuberculosis, a condition would plague him throughout his life and require hospitalization again in 1938, 1947, and 1950.

In 1933, Orwell gave up teaching and spent almost a year in Southwold writing his next book, Burmese Days. During this time, he worked part time in a bookshop, where he met his future wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. He and Eileen were he married in 1936, shortly before he moved to Spain to write newspaper articles about the Spanish Civil War.

In Spain, Orwell found what he had been searching for — a true socialist state. He joined the struggle against the Fascist party but had to flee when the group with which he was associated was falsely accused of secretly helping the Fascists.

By 1939, Orwell had returned to England. In 1941, he took a position with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as the person in charge of broadcasting to India and Southeast Asia. Orwell disliked this job immensely, being, as he was, in charge of disseminating propaganda to these British colonies — an act that went against both his nature and his political philosophy. In 1943, Orwell took a job more to his liking, as the literary editor of The Tribune.

Shortly after Orwell and Eileen adopted a son in 1944, Orwell became a war correspondent for the Observer in Paris and Cologne, Germany. Tragically, Eileen died in the beginning of that year, just before the publication of one of his most important novels, Animal Farm . Despite the loss of his wife and his own battle with poor health, Orwell continued his writing and completed the revision of 1984 in 1948. It was published early the next year with great success.

Orwell remarried in 1949 to Sonia Brownell, only a year before his own death of tuberculosis. He is buried in the churchyard of All Saints, Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire.

Literary Writing

Orwell's writing career spanned nearly seventeen years. Ironically, although Orwell didn't consider himself a novelist, he wrote two of the most important literary masterpieces of the 20th century: Animal Farm and 1984 . While these are the most famous novels of his career, his memoirs, other novels, and essential work as an essayist all contribute to the body of work that makes up important twentieth century literature.

In Orwell's writing, he sought truth. Even his fiction has elements of the world around him, of the wars and struggles that he witnessed, of the terrible nature of politics, and the terrible toll that totalitarianism takes on the human spirit. From the time he began to write at the age of twenty-four, Orwell longed to capture the struggles of "real" people, to live among the less fortunate, and to tell their stories. Of his own writing, Orwell has said that he writes because there is some kind of lie that he has to expose, some fact to which he wants to draw attention. Orwell certainly does this in 1984, a novel fraught with political purpose, meaning, and warning.

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“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 was born Eric Blair in India in 1903 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” (1936) 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 1950, 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 Biography of Orwell,  Orwell: the Life won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award.

As part of our wider commitment to promote knowledge and understanding of Orwell’s life and work, the Foundation also regularly releases new short educational films. These are free to access on YouTube and include contributions from Orwell’s son Richard Blair, D. J. Taylor, and previous winners of the Orwell Prizes:

• The Night Orwell Died
• George Orwell and the Battle for Animal Farm
• ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’: 75th anniversary film

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Biography Online

Biography George Orwell

Orwell’s Early life

Orwell was born Eric Blair on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, Bihar, in India. Shortly after his birth, he was taken by his mother back to Oxfordshire, England. His family were financially poor, but an aspiring middle-class family. Orwell described it as ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ – a reflection of the importance he felt the English attached to class labels.

With his family unable to afford fees to a proper public school, he was educated at St Cyprian’s in Eastbourne, which served as a preliminary crammer to gaining a scholarship for public schools like Eton. In a later essay “Such, Such were the Joys” he was scathing of his time at St Cyprian’s noting how difficult it was to be happy in such a mean-spirited environment. Aged 14, he was able to move to Eton, where he had better memories because of the greater intellectual stimulation. However, the awareness of being much poorer than many of his school friends remained. He left Eton with firmly held “middle class” values but at the same time a sense of unease with his social position.

After school, he was unable to afford university, and for want of a better option, Orwell took a job with the Burmese civil service. It was here in Burma, that Orwell would begin to assert his independence from his privileged upbringing. Revealingly, Orwell later told how he found himself rooting for the local population, and despising the imperial ideology which he represented. He resigned from his position in 1927. In an essay Shooting the Elephant he describes he feelings on Burma:

“ Theoretically and secretly of course, I was always for the Burmese and all against the oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear” (1)

It was in the nature of George Orwell to try and see a situation from other people’s point of view. He was unhappy at accepting the conventional social wisdom. In fact, he grew to despise his middle-class upbringing so much he decided to spend time as a tramp. He wanted to experience life from the view of the gutter. His vivid experiences are recorded in his book “ Down and out in Paris and London ”. No longer could Orwell be described as a “Champagne Socialist”; by living with the poorest and underprivileged,  he gained a unique insight into the practical workings of working class ideas and working-class politics.

The Road to Wigan Pier

In the middle of the great depression, Orwell undertook another experience travelling to Wigan; an industrial town in Lancashire experiencing the full effects of mass unemployment and poverty. Orwell freely admitted how, as a young child, he was brought up to despise the working class. He vividly tells how he was obsessed with the idea that the working classes smelt:

“At a distance.. I could agonise over their sufferings, but I still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them .” (2)

The Road to Wigan Pier offered a penetrating insight into the condition of the working classes. It was also a right of passage for Orwell to live amongst the people he had once, from a distance, despised. The Road to Wigan Pier inevitably had a political message, but characteristically of Orwell, it was not all pleasing to the left. For example, it was less than flattering towards the Communist party. This was despite the book being promoted by a mostly Communist organisation – The Left Book club.

Orwell and the Spanish Civil War

It was fighting in the Spanish Civil war that Orwell came to really despise Communist influences. In 1936, Orwell volunteered to fight for the fledgeling Spanish Republic, who at the time were fighting the Fascist forces of General  Franco. It was a conflict that polarised nations. To the left, the war was a symbol of a real socialist revolution, based on the principles of equality and freedom. It was for these ideals that many international volunteers, from around the world, went to Spain to fight on behalf of the Republic. Orwell found himself in the heart of the Socialist revolution in Barcelona. He was assigned to an Anarchist – Trotskyist party – P.O.U.M. More than most other left-wing parties, they believed in the ideal of a real Marxist revolution. To members of the P.O.U.M, the war was not just about fighting the Fascist menace but also delivering a Socialist revolution for the working classes. In his book, “ Homage to Catalonia ” Orwell writes of his experiences; he notes the inefficiency with which the Spanish fought even wars. He was enthused by the revolutionary fervour of some of his party members; however, one of the overriding impressions was his perceived betrayal of the Republic, by the Stalinist backed Communist party.

“ the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon the extreme right. In reality this should come as no surprise, because the tactics of the Communist parties elsewhere ” (3)

Unwittingly he found himself engaged in a civil war amongst the left, as the Soviet Union backed Communist party turned on the Trotskyite factions like P.O.U.M. In the end, Orwell narrowly escaped with his life, after being shot in the throat. He was able to return to England, but he had learnt at first hand how revolutions could easily be betrayed; ideas that would later shape his seminal work “ Animal Farm .”

Orwell at the BBC

During the Second World War, Orwell was declared unfit for active duty. He actively supported the war effort from the start. (He didn’t wait for the Soviet Union to enter like some communists.) He also began writing for the left-leaning magazine ‘The Tribune’ which was associated with the left of the Labour Party. Orwell was appointed editor and was enthusiastic in supporting the radical Labour government of 1945, which implemented a national health service, welfare state and nationalisation of major industries. However, Orwell was not just focused on politics, he took an active interest in working class life and English culture. His short essays investigated aspects of English life from fish and chips to the eleven rules of making a good cup of tea.

Orwell described himself as a secular humanist and could be critical of organised religion in his writings. However, he had a fondness for the social and cultural aspect of the Church of England and attended services intermittently.

Barnhill. Jura

He married Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1936 and in 1944, they adopted a three-week old child – Richard Horatio. Orwell was devastated when Eileen died and sought to remarry – seeking a mother for his young son. He asked several women for their hand in marriage, with Sonia Branwell accepting in 1949 – despite Orwell’s increasingly poor health. Orwell was a heavy smoker and this affected his lungs causing bronchial problems. In the last years of his life, he moved to a remote farm on the Scottish island of Jura to concentrate on his writings. Orwell passed away on 21 January 1950. His friend David Astor helped him to be buried at Sutton Courtenay churchyard, Oxfordshire.

The two great novels of Orwell were “ Animal Farm ” and “ 1984 ”. Animal Farm is a simple allegory for revolutions which go wrong, based primarily on the Russian revolution. 1984 is a dystopian nightmare about the dangers of a totalitarian state which gains complete control over its citizens.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of George Orwell”, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net 3 Feb. 2013. Last updated 4 Feb 2018.

• The Socialism of George Orwell
• George Orwell Quotes
• George Orwell, “Shooting an elephant”, George Orwell selected writings (1958) p.25
• George Orwell, “Road to Wigan Pier” (Harmondswith) 1980 p.130
• George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia 1959 p.58

George Orwell – a collection of essays

George Orwell – a collection of essays at Amazon.com

Animal Farm and 1984

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George Orwell

George Orwell, aka Eric Arthur Blair, was an English essayist, novelist, critic, and journalist. The works of George Orwell are featured by bitter social criticism, coherent prose, and hostility to totalitarianism, and blunt support of democratic communism.

George Orwell wrote fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and polemical journalism.  He is well-known for his most celebrated allegorical novel Animal Farm published in 1945 and a dystopian novel 1984 that was published in 1949.

He also produced non-fiction works that include The Road to Wigan Pier published in 1937 and Homage to Catalonia published in 1938.  The Road to Wigan Pier is his personal account of his working-class experience in the north of England; whereas, Homage to Catalonia is based on his first-hand experience of soldering in the Spanish Civil War. These two essays are critically admired for their views on politics and literature, culture, and language. Among the 50 greatest British writers since 1945, George Orwell was ranked 2 nd by The Time in 2008.

The works of George Orwell are influential in the politics and literature of England. To describe the authoritarian and social practices, the adjective “Orwellian” is used in the English language. His other coinages are Thought Police, Big Brother, Room101, Memory hole, Two Minutes Hate, doublethink, Newspeak, Unperson, thoughtcrime, and proles.

A Short Biography of George Orwell

George Orwell was born on 25 th June 1903 in Bengal in the class of Sahibs. His father serves the British official in the Indian civil services, whereas his mother belonged to French and was a daughter of a teak merchant in Myanmar Burma. Though they belong to the lower-middle class, they have the attitude of “landless legendary.” Orwell grew up in an atmosphere of underprivileged condescension. He returned to England with his parents, and in 1911, he was sent to elementary boarding school on the coast of Sussex. Over there, his poverty and intellectual brilliance mark him distinguished from other boys. He was made to grow up as a miserable, reserved, and bizarre boy in the boarding school. In his essay Such, Such Were the Joys published in 1953, he recounts the miseries of these days.  

Orwell secured the scholarships of Eton and Wellington, the two of the leading schools in England. He attended the Wellington School for a short time, and from 1917 to 1921, he attended Eton.  He published his first writing in the Eton College in the college periodicals. After completing college, he did not continue his higher education, and following the tradition of his family, he went to Burma in 1922. He was given a position in the Indian Imperial Police as assistant district superintendent.  He worked at different stations of the country and gave an impression of an imperial servant.

From boyhood, he wanted to become a writer. He realized that the Burmese are ruled over by the British against their will and treat them as enemies; he started feeling ashamed of his job as a colonial police officer. In his novel Burmese Days , and autobiographical essays “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” that he wrote later on in his life, he recounted those experiences and his personal views on imperialism.

In 1927, Orwell went to England on leave, and in England, he decided not to continue his job in Burma. On 1 st January 1928, he resigned from the imperial police. As he had taken a decision before, he had already begun a course of action to become a writer. He felt guilty for the status that prevented him from mingling with the Burmese; he went to East England and started living in slums with the poor people

It was his experiences in the slums that he recounted in his work Down and Out in Paris and London. In this work, he rearranged the real incidents into fiction. The book was then published in 1933 that gained him little recognition.  In 1934, he published his first novel Burmese Days . The novel establishes his design of the succeeding novels in which he portrayed a conscientious, sensitive, and lonely emotional individual who is against the dishonest and oppressive society.  In 1935 he wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter, and in 1936, he wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

George Orwell personally rejected his bourgeois lifestyle and political reorientation in his revolt against imperialism. He called himself revolutionary soon after his return from Burma. During the 1930s, he called him socialist; however, he was not too liberal in his thinking to declare himself a communist.

In 1937 Orwell published his first socialist book The Road to Wigan pier . This was his original and nonconformist political discourse. The book is a serious criticism of the prevailing social movements. The time when the book was in printing, Orwell went to Spain to report the Civil War and joined the Republican Militia. He served on the Teruel and Aragon fronts and rose to the second lieutenant. In May 1937, he started fighting against the communist in Barcelona and escaped to Spain to save his life when the communist started killing their political opponents. In 1938, he published Homage to Catalonia, in which he recounted his Spanish experiences and lifelong dread of communism.

In 1938, he returned to England. In the following year, he wrote Coming Up for Air in which he showed unexpected conservative anxiety. Orwell refused to pay any military services in World War II and started a job as a head in Indian head office of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In 1943, he left his job at BBC and started a job at Tribune as literary editor. During that time, Orwell had become a creative journalist and wrote many reviews and articles for newspapers along with serious criticism. He advocated decentralist socialism and liberation. In 1945 he published the most celebrated allegorical novella “Animal Farm.” It is a harsh criticism of Russian Stalinism. Following “Animal farm,” he published 1984 in 1947. He died on 21 st January 1950 due to Tuberculosis.

George Orwell’s Writing Style

Typically, the writing style of George Orwell is brief and to the point . In his late works Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell does not use any figurative language, intricate language, and unnecessary words intentionally. His writings are largely based on social and political issues and contain an obscure political message.

According to George Orwell, the language used by many writers of his time was incorrect and was used to trick people. He asserts that modern writers were writing without using the actual term, thus making it easier for the readers to deploy the reality and quite difficult to understand the real meaning from the text.

Through the use of exaggerated language and euphemism, the political writers try to sound well-informed and keen.  For example, the fascist regimes of World War II used the word “elimination” to justify their mass killing and exploitation. For Orwell, the English language was insensitive and chaotic. It allowed people to have unethical thoughts and are not able to think freely.

According to Orwell, Literature will become more beautiful when it becomes simple and clear for normal readers. Orwell improved his writing in St. Cyprian School and inspired his writing from the most experienced. His writings reflect the teaching of Mrs. Cicely Vaughan Wilkes. She taught him honesty, simplicity, and avoidance of verbosity.

Orwell offers six rules of writing literature in his book “Politics and the English Language,” which will help the writers to improve their writings as well as avoid the exploitation of modern English.  The writing style of George Orwell is also based on these six rules. He did not use the ordinary figures of speeches like simile, metaphor, etc. and the one used by other writers.

According to Orwell, a writer cannot understand the true meaning of the phrase when he imitates others, and the original purpose is lost.

Secondly, he did not use long words where short words can easily be fit. For Orwell, simplicity in literature is valuable. It is better to convey the message in simple language than figurative language.

Thirdly, he wrote short, straight and to the point sentences .

Fourthly, he would write in an active voice and do not use passive voice without necessity. For him, the passive voice creates unnecessary confusion.

Fifth, He did not use any scientific word or foreign phrase if there is an equivalent word in the everyday language. He was very flexible in his writing and also advised the readers and writer not to strictly abide by these rules. If there is a necessity of breaking the rule for better, then break it. In the book, he writes that for certain, you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against”.

In his two most celebrated and well-read novels, Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell reflects his personal beliefs about the English Language. He used language to manipulate and control others in both novels.  The elite pigs in Animal Farm use the intricate figure of speeches, propaganda, and songs to twist their meanings of words and make a fool of other animals.

In 1984 , the language was made limited, which does not allow people to express their thoughts in words. Thus, Orwell implies that the government can manipulate the thoughts of people. The government uses the ideological state apparatus to spread the discourses in Newspeak.

Moreover, George Orwell has a journalistic and direct style. To illustrate his meaning behind his whole writing, he used extended metaphors and allusions; however, he does not employ them in his writing. He has a dry style and does not use unnecessary imagery. This does not imply that he did not explain the scenery in the setting; it is just that he did not use figurative language.

The major themes of his works are language, loyalty, totalitarianism, poor vs. rich, imperialism, propaganda, love/ sexuality, communism, and technology, etc.

Works Of George Orwell

• Animal Farm
• Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell Biography

George orwell 1903-1950.

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair, a twentieth century writer, equally at home with journalism, essays, novels, literary criticism and social commentary. He was famous in all those areas, but will be particularly remembered for two of his novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four , both among the most significant works of literature of the twentieth century and two of the most influential. Indeed, many of George Orwell’s quotes from his works have become commonly known, and used as new English language phrases.

Three of Orwell’s non-fiction collections are classics of journalism. Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) tells the story of living as a tramp in those two rich cities; The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a close observation of the working class in the north of England and Homage to Catalonia (1938) is an account of his activities in the Spanish Civil War.

A keen observer of the trends of his time Orwell forged his two great novels from those observations and, particularly in the case of Nineteen Eighty Four he emerged as a kind of prophet, warning society about where it seemed to be heading. In the novel people have become dehumanised, governed by an unseen administration that controls them with a fast-growing technology. The novel makes the future look bleak. Governments, since the book came out, have often been warned by their critics of bringing the country closer to nineteen eighty four, with the increase of such things as censorship and camera surveillance. The language Orwell used in writing this novel contains many words and phrases which he employed to create the dystopian world of the novel .

George Orwell photo

Some of the words and phrases he invented have entered into the English language and are used routinely, eg. Big Brother, thought police , Room 101 , thoughtcrime , doublethink .

Some other newspeak words are: joycamp (forced labour camp); goodthink (correct thinking); oldthink (thought that disregards the revolution); prolefeed (the endless stream of television propaganda).

Nineteen Eighty-Four has long stood and still stands, as a warning about the threat to democracy by a strong tendency towards authoritarianism by ‘strong man’ leaders. Indeed, such things as surveillance cameras that intrude on every aspect of life, even in the most advanced democracies, monitoring of emails, interactive television, the mushrooming of obfuscatory language in politics, such as ‘alternative facts,’ ‘fake news,’ etc. are firmly with us and just what Orwell predicted.

Animal Farm is a short novel that depicts the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the beginning of the Stalin era. The story is told using the techniques of allegorical fiction. The characters are animals and different groups of Soviet society are represented by the classes of animals, eg. The proletarians are sheep, the members of the Communist party are pigs, the security police are dogs etc. The novel is written in such a way as to be accessible to everyone and can be read on one level by a child. It is a remarkable book that explores the Revolution in great depth in a short text.

Apart from his linguistic inventiveness in his novels, Orwell’s style when writing essays and journalism is very plain and simple, clear and lucid. He set out rules for that kind of writing that included using short words, fresh metaphors if metaphors are needed, cut out any words that it is possible to cut out, don’t use scientific language or jargon or foreign phrases and don’t use the passive case. Employing those rules in his own writing Orwell produced a very high level of communication. One of his essays, How to kill an Elephant, written in stripped-down prose, for example, conveys immense feeling by the mere shock of the elephant’s death. While working as a policeman in Burma in 1930 Orwell witnessed a hanging and wrote about it in a piece, A Hanging . The reader feels the full horror of it as Orwell describes it in unemotional, factual, unadorned language.

Some writers’style or ideas are so distinct that their names become adjectives to describe those styles or ideas, as in Shakespearean and Miltonian .   Orwellian has been added to that list. To describe something as Orwellian is to refer, not just to a kind of writing but a kind of situation in which a population is controlled by misinformation, surveillance, the rewriting of history and the policing of people’s thoughts.

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7 Facts About George Orwell

His real name is Eric Blair

As a child, Orwell yearned to become a famous author, but he intended to publish as E.A. Blair, not his birth name, Eric Blair (he didn't feel the name Eric was suitable for a writer). However, when his first book came out — Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) — a complete pseudonym was necessary (he felt his family wouldn't appreciate the public knowing their Eton-educated son had worked as a dishwasher and lived as a tramp).

Orwell provided his publisher with a list of potential pseudonyms. In addition to George Orwell, which was his preference, the other choices were: P.S. Burton, Kenneth Miles and H. Lewis Allways.

He was spied on during the Spanish Civil War

Orwell not only wrote about state surveillance, but he also experienced it. Biographer Gordon Bowker found the Soviet Union had an undercover agent spying on Orwell and other leftists while they were fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Secret police in Spain also seized diaries Orwell had made while in the country and probably passed them to the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB).

In addition, his own government kept track of Orwell (a fact he was likely unaware of). This began in 1929 when he volunteered to write for a left-wing publication in France. The police also paid attention when Orwell visited coal miners in 1936 while gathering information for The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In 1942, a police sergeant reported to MI5 that Orwell had "advanced communist views" and dressed "in a bohemian fashion, both at his office and in his leisure hours." Fortunately, the MI5 case officer actually knew Orwell's work and that "he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him.

He had difficulties publishing 'Animal Farm'

Financial and popular success eluded Orwell until Animal Farm , his allegorical look at the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. But despite the book's quality, in 1944 Orwell encountered trouble while trying to get it published. Some didn't seem to understand it: T.S. Eliot , a director of publisher Faber and Faber, noted, "Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm." Victor Gollancz, who'd published much of Orwell's earlier work, was loath to criticize the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin .

Publisher Jonathan Cape almost took on the book, but the Ministry of Information advised against antagonizing the Soviet Union, an ally in World War II (however, the official who gave this warning was later discovered to be a Soviet spy). With rejections accumulating, Orwell even considered self-publishing before Animal Farm was accepted by Fredric Warburg's small press. The success that followed the book's 1945 release probably had some publishers regretting their earlier refusals.

Ernest Hemingway gave him a gun

During the Spanish Civil War, Stalinists turned on POUM, the left-wing group Orwell fought with. This led to POUM members being arrested, tortured and even killed. Orwell escaped Spain before he was taken into custody — but when he traveled to Paris in 1945 to work as a correspondent, he felt he could still be in danger from Communists who were targeting their enemies.

A gun could offer protection, but as a civilian Orwell couldn't easily acquire one. His solution was to turn to Ernest Hemingway . Orwell visited Hemingway at the Ritz and explained his fears. Hemingway, who admired Orwell's writing, handed over a Colt .32. It's unknown if Orwell ever had to use the weapon.

He was friends with Aldous Huxley

Before Orwell wrote 1984 (1949) and Aldous Huxley penned Brave New World (1932), the two met at Eton, where Huxley taught French. While some students took advantage of and mocked Huxley's poor eyesight, Orwell reportedly stood up for him and enjoyed having Huxley as a teacher.

Orwell and Huxley also read each other's most famous work. Writing in Time and Tide in 1940, Orwell called Brave New World "a good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia" but said "it had no relation to the actual future," which he envisaged as "something more like the Spanish Inquisition." In 1949, Huxley sent Orwell a letter with his take on 1984. Though he admired it, he felt "the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."

He sent the government a list of people he thought were communist sympathizers

On May 2, 1949, Orwell sent a list of names to a friend at the Foreign Office whose job was to fight Soviet propaganda. The 35 names were people he suspected of being communist sympathizers. Orwell noted in his letter, ''It isn't a bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed." He also wrote, "Even as it stands I imagine that this list is very libelous, or slanderous, or whatever the term is, so will you please see that it is returned to me without fail."

Orwell wanted Britain to survive the threat of totalitarianism, and almost certainly felt he was helping that cause. However, it's still surprising that the man who came up with the concept of Big Brother felt comfortable providing the government with a list of suspect names.

He died from tuberculosis

When Orwell's tuberculosis worsened in the 1940s, a cure existed: the antibiotic streptomycin, which had been on in the market in America since 1946. However, streptomycin wasn't readily available in post-war Great Britain.

Given his connections and success, Orwell was able to obtain the drug in 1948 but experienced a severe allergic reaction to it: hair falling out, disintegrating nails and painful throat ulcerations, among other symptoms. His doctors, new to the drug, didn't know a lower dosage likely could have saved him without the horrible side effects; instead, Orwell ceased treatment (the remainder was given to two other TB patients, who recovered). He tried streptomycin once more in 1949 but still couldn't tolerate it. Orwell succumbed to TB on January 21, 1950.

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Nothing but the truth: the legacy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Every generation turns to it in times of political turmoil, and this extract from a new book about the novel examines its relevance in the age of fake news and Trump Read other extracts from the book: David Bowie’s Orwell: how Nineteen Eighty-Four shaped Diamond Dogs ‘He typed in bed in his dressing gown’: how Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four

December 1948. A man sits at a typewriter, in bed, on a remote island, fighting to complete the book that means more to him than any other. He is terribly ill. The book will be finished and, a year or so later, so will the man.

January 2017. Another man stands before a crowd, which is not as large as he would like, in Washington DC, taking the oath of office as the 45th president of the United States of America. His press secretary says that it was the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe”. Asked to justify such a preposterous lie, the president’s adviser describes the statement as “alternative facts”. Over the next four days, US sales of the dead man’s book will rocket by almost 10,000%, making it a No 1 bestseller.

When George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in the United Kingdom on 8 June 1949, in the heart of the 20th century, one critic wondered how such a timely book could possibly exert the same power over generations to come. Thirty-five years later, when the present caught up with Orwell’s future and the world was not the nightmare he had described, commentators again predicted that its popularity would wane. Another 35 years have elapsed since then, and Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the book we turn to when truth is mutilated, when language is distorted, when power is abused, when we want to know how bad things can get. It is still, in the words of Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange , “an apocalyptical codex of our worst fears”.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has not just sold tens of millions of copies – it has infiltrated the consciousness of countless people who have never read it. The phrases and concepts that Orwell minted have become essential fixtures of political language, still potent after decades of use and misuse: newspeak, Big Brother, the thought police, Room 101, the two minutes’ hate, doublethink, unperson, memory hole, telescreen, 2+2=5 and the ministry of truth. Its title came to define a calendar year, while the word Orwellian has turned the author’s own name into a capacious synonym for everything he hated and feared.

It has been adapted for cinema, television, radio, theatre, opera and ballet and has influenced novels, films, plays, television shows, comic books, albums, advertisements, speeches, election campaigns and uprisings. People have spent years in jail just for reading it. No work of literary fiction from the past century approaches its cultural ubiquity while retaining its weight. Dissenting voices such as Milan Kundera and Harold Bloom have argued that Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually a bad novel, with thin characters, humdrum prose and an implausible plot, but even they couldn’t gainsay its importance.

A novel that has been claimed by socialists, conservatives, anarchists, liberals, Catholics and libertarians of every description cannot be, as Kundera alleged, merely “political thought disguised as a novel”. Orwell’s famously translucent prose conceals a world of complexity. Normally thought of as a dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four is also, to varying and debatable degrees, a satire, a prophecy, a warning, a political thesis, a work of science fiction, a spy thriller, a psychological horror, a gothic nightmare, a postmodern text and a love story. Most people read it when they’re young and feel bruised by it – it offers more suffering and less reassurance than any other standard high-school text – but don’t feel compelled to rediscover it in adulthood. That’s a shame. It is far richer and stranger than you remember.

Orwell felt that he lived in cursed times . He fantasised about another life in which he could have spent his days gardening and writing fiction instead of being “forced into becoming a pamphleteer”, but that would have been a waste. His real talent was for analysing and explaining a tumultuous period in human history. Written down, his core values might seem too vague to carry much weight – honesty, decency, liberty, justice – but no one else wrestled so tirelessly, in private and in public, with what those ideas meant during the darkest days of the 20th century. He always tried to tell the truth and admired anyone who did likewise. Nothing built on a lie, however seductively convenient, could have value. Central to his honesty was his commitment to constantly working out what he thought and why he thought it and never ceasing to reassess those opinions. To quote Christopher Hitchens, one of Orwell’s most eloquent admirers : “It matters not what you think, but how you think.”

I first encountered Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager in suburban south London. As Orwell said, the books you read when you’re young stay with you for ever. I found it shocking and compelling, but this was circa 1990, when communism and apartheid were on the way out, optimism reigned and the world didn’t feel particularly Orwellian. Even after 9/11, the book’s relevance was fragmentary: it was applied to political language, or the media, or surveillance, but not the whole picture. Democracy was on the rise and the internet was largely considered a force for good.

In 2016, the world changed. As Trump took the White House, Britain voted for Brexit and populism swept across Europe, people took to talking anxiously about the upheavals of the 1970s and, worse, the 1930s. Bookshop shelves began filling up with titles such as How Democracy Ends , The Road to Unfreedom and The Death of Truth , many of which quoted Orwell. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism merited a new edition, pitched as “a nonfiction bookend to Nineteen Eighty-Four ”. So did Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel about American fascism, It Can’t Happen Here . Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was as alarming as a documentary. “I was asleep before,” said Elisabeth Moss’s character, Offred. “That’s how we let it happen.” Well, we weren’t asleep any more. I was reminded of something Orwell wrote about fascism in 1936: “If you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon.” Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book designed to wake you up.

It was the first dystopian novel to be written in the knowledge that dystopia was real. In Germany and the Soviet bloc, men had built it and forced other men and women to live and die within its iron borders. Those regimes are gone but Orwell’s book continues to define our nightmares, even as they shift and change. “For me, it’s like a Greek myth, to take and do with it what you will – to examine yourself,” Michael Radford, the director of the 1984 movie adaptation, told me. “It’s a mirror,” says a character in the 2013 stage version. “Every age sees itself reflected.” For singer-songwriter Billy Bragg: “Every time I read it, it seems to be about something else.”

After President Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway first used the phrase “alternative facts” on 22 January 2017, The Hollywood Reporter called Nineteen Eighty-Four “the hottest literary property in town”. Scores of cinemas across the US announced that they would be screening Michael Radford’s 1984 on 4 April, because “the clock is already striking 13”. And theatre producers Sonia Friedman and Scott Rudin asked British playwrights Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan to transfer their hit play 1984 to Broadway as soon as possible. “It went from zero to a hundred in the space of five days,” Icke told me. “They said, ‘We think it’s important this play is on Broadway now.’”

When the play was in the West End, each of its three runs inhabited a different political context – the third opened during the Brexit referendum, just before the murder of Jo Cox MP by a far-right terrorist. During the run at New York’s Hudson theatre, which began on 18 May 2017, the directors noticed that the audience’s reaction each night was affected by whatever Donald Trump had done that day. The night after Trump tweeted the nonsense word covfefe , there was such a desire for humour that one actor was distraught: “I’ve been in comedies that have had less laughter than this.” On another night, the news was so bad that people passed out. At a third performance, when Winston Smith’s chief antagonist O’Brien asked: “What year is it?”, a woman shouted: “It’s 2017 and this is fucked up!”

It must be said that Trump is no Big Brother. Nor, despite his revival of such toxic phrases as “America First” and “enemy of the people”, is he simply a throwback to the 1930s. He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline, intellect or ideology. His closest fictional precursor is probably Buzz Windrip, the oafish populist from It Can’t Happen Here . In the real world, Trump’s forefather is Joseph McCarthy, who displayed comparable levels of narcissism, dishonesty, resentment and crude ambition and an uncanny ability to make journalists dance to his tune even as they loathed him. Still, Orwell would have recognised the type. “I think Dad would’ve been amused by Donald Trump in an ironic sort of way,” said Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, in 2017. “He may have thought, ‘There goes the sort of man I wrote about all those years ago.’”

There are precedents in Orwell’s writing. During Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton, it was hard to watch the candidate whipping supporters into a cry of “Lock her up!” without being reminded of the two minutes’ hate. The president also meets most of the criteria of Orwell’s 1944 definition of fascism: “Something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class… almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘fascist’.” Orwell contended that such men can only rise to the top when the status quo has failed to satisfy citizens’ need for justice, liberty and self-worth, but Trump’s victory required one more crucial ingredient.

He did not seize power through a revolution or coup. He was not potentiated by a recession or a terrorist atrocity, let alone a nuclear war or a fertility crisis. His route to the White House passed through America’s own “ Versionland ”, which is Russia expert Luke Harding’s name for the post-truth politics of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In Versionland, flagrant lies become “alternative facts”. Trump creates his own reality and measures his power by the number of people who subscribe to it: the cruder the lie, the more power its success demonstrates. It is truly Orwellian that the phrase “fake news” has been turned on its head by Trump and his fellow authoritarians to describe real news that is not to their liking. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani accidentally provided a crude motto for Versionland USA when he snapped at an interviewer: “ Truth isn’t truth !” In the words of O’Brien, reality is inside the skull.

How did this happen? On the eve of 1984, the science-fiction writer Marta Randall argued that one thing Orwell didn’t predict was the spread of cynicism: “It would be very hard for ‘Big Brother’ to convince anyone of anything post-Watergate and post-Vietnam.” In the 1980s, she suggested, Orwell’s target would have been the trivialisation of the news media. “We may quit relying on ‘authoritative’ news stories entirely.” Over time, this distrust of establishment narratives led many people to seek the truth but many others to choose their own “truths”. Combining cynicism with credulity, people who were proudly sceptical of CNN or the New York Times were perfectly happy to take unsourced Facebook posts and quack science at face value. Social media made this process all too easy. Facebook’s former chief of security, Alex Stamos, pointed out that using the blunt instrument to eliminate fake news could turn the platform into “the ministry of truth with ML [machine-learning] systems”, but by failing to act in time, Facebook was already allowing “bad actors” such as Russia’s Internet Research Agency to spread disinformation unchecked.

The problem is likely to get worse. The growth of “ deep fake ” image synthesis, which combines computer graphics and artificial intelligence to manufacture images whose artificiality can only be identified by expert analysis, has the potential to create a paranoid labyrinth in which, according to the viewer’s bias, fake images will pass as real, while real ones are dismissed as fake.

During a speech in July 2018, Trump said: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” A line from Nineteen Eighty-Four went viral: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

One might feel wistful for the days when Big Brother was a joke and Orwell had “won”, as many commentators thought after the fall of the Berlin Wall. An era plagued by far-right populism, authoritarian nationalism, rampant disinformation and waning faith in liberal democracy is not one in which Nineteen Eighty-Four can be easily dismissed.

Orwell was both too pessimistic and not pessimistic enough. On the one hand, the west did not succumb to totalitarianism. Consumerism, not endless war, became the engine of the global economy. But he did not appreciate the tenacity of racism and religious extremism. Nor did he foresee that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is about many things and its readers’ concerns dictate which one is paramount at any point in history. During the cold war, it was a book about totalitarianism. In the 1980s, it became a warning about technology. Today, it is most of all a defence of truth.

Orwell’s fear, incubated during the months he spent fighting in the Spanish civil war, that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world” is the dark heart of Nineteen Eighty-Four . It gripped him long before he came up with Big Brother, Oceania, newspeak or the telescreen, and it’s more important than any of them. In its original 1949 review, Life correctly identified the essence of Orwell’s message: “If men continue to believe in such facts as can be tested and to reverence the spirit of truth in seeking greater knowledge, they can never be fully enslaved.” Seventy years later, that feels like a very large if.

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A Brief Biography of George Orwell

By Tim Lambert

His Early Life

George Orwell was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in India. His father was a colonial civil servant and the family was middle class but not particularly well off. However, when Orwell was only a year old his mother moved back to England while his father stayed in India until 1912. Meanwhile, in 1911 George went to St Cyprian’s School in Eastbourne. In 1917 he won a scholarship to Eton but in 1921 he joined the British police in Burma. However, Orwell grew dissatisfied and he resigned in 1927.

George Orwell decided to become a writer. He also began living among the poor. In 1928 he journeyed to Paris. For a short time in 1932-1933, Orwell worked as a teacher in a small private school. In 1934 Orwell got a part-time job in a second-hand bookshop.

Meanwhile, in 1933 his first book was published Down and Out in Paris and London. In 1934 his first novel Burmese Days was published. In 1935 George Orwell had another novel published. It was called A Clergyman’s Daughter. It was followed in 1936 by Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Also in 1936, Orwell married Eileen. (She died in 1945).

In 1936 George Orwell was commissioned to write a book about poverty in northern England. The Road to Wigan Pier was published in 1937.

Meanwhile, Orwell, a Socialist left for Spain in December 1936 to fight in the Spanish Civil War. (The civil war was between the left-wing Republicans and the Fascist Nationalists. Some foreign volunteers took part). While there he was wounded in the throat. Meanwhile, Communists began to arrest dissenters, and Orwell was forced to flee from Spain. After arriving in Britain he wrote A Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938.

The Great Writer

However, by 1938 Orwell was suffering from tuberculosis. He spent the winter of 1938-1939 in Morocco. In 1939 another novel, Coming Up For Air was published. At the beginning of the Second World War George Orwell was rejected for military service but from 1941 to 1943 he worked for the BBC. In 1943 he became literary editor for the Tribune a left-wing magazine.

Then in 1945 his great satire Animal Farm was published. In 1949 his masterpiece 1984 was published. But his health was failing. In October 1949 George Orwell married his second wife Sonia. George Orwell died on 21 January 1950. He was only 46.

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George Orwell

Publishing under the pen name George Orwell, Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903 - January 21, 1950) was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. He studied briefly under Aldous Huxley and was also a keen observer of culture. Disturbed by social injustice, he was committed to democratic socialism and opposed to totalitarianism.

Orwell is widely known for his 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984 ) and his novella, Animal Farm (1945). His work continues to influence popular culture, whose works typify the genre of Dystopian Fiction and Realism . Words he's credited with introducing to popular culture include: cold war, big brother, thought police, Room 101, doublethink , and thoughtcrime. "Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition which is destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. We feature Orwell in our Science Fiction Study Guide and collection of Dystopian Stories .

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."