Biography of George Orwell

Full name: George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair

Place of birth: Motihari, British India

Date of birth: June 25, 1903

Died: January 21, 1950 in London, England

Literary genres: Novels / Essays

George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, was born in India when his father Richard Walmsley Blair was serving as administrator of the opium ministry of the colonial government of India; but he grew up and studied in England, although he later returned to India, where he was part of the imperial police.

Years later, in 1928, tired of imperialist practices, he returned to Europe with the determination to forge his career as a man of letters. He lived in Paris, a city in which he had a painful existence, since he was forced to work as a dishwasher in a luxurious hotel to survive; He then went to London where he would work as a schoolteacher and bookseller. That period of his life would be captured in his first book «Down and Out in Paris and London» (1933), which would seal the social trend that would define all of his work.

In 1934 he published his first two novels: Burmese Days and A Clergyman's Daughter, the latter about English life. Two years later he published two other works: the novel "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" and "The Road to Wigan Pier", a book in which he describes the effects of depression and examines the prospects of socialism in England.

He always had a socialist ideology, but an exaggeratedly critical one. He intervened in the Spanish civil war, where he was wounded. During his recovery he wrote «Homage to Catalonia», a work in which he attacks the communists of the Soviet Numen, for their partisan and monopolistic politics, to which he attributes the causes of the defeat.

With his novel «Coming Up for Air» he returned to the subject of English social life. It is the last work that he published before the Second World War, in which he could not participate due to his delicate health. In 1942 he began to collaborate in The Observer and in 1943 he joined the editorial staff of the weekly magazine Tribune. It is during this time that he wrote most of his essays. Orwell was a prolific writer who wrote on a wide range of topics related to contemporary society in England, politics and literature.

Numerous essays of his were published in anthologies during his lifetime. : «Inside the Whale and Other Essays» (1940), by Victor Gollancz Ltd, its original publisher; and «Critical Essays», by Secker and Warburg (1946). And also after his death, Secker & Warburg published the collections as «Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays» (1950, later edited by Penguin in 2003) and «England Your England and Other Essays» (1953).

In 1946 he published «Animal Farm», a fiery satire of the Soviet regime, with which he achieved international recognition. In 1949 his anticipatory novel, «1984», appeared, in which he presents a portrait of the future world, in an ideal extension of the line of Soviet communism brought to its most anguishing and painful outcome. In this dystopian novel he creates the concept of "Big Brother", which has since marked the universal language of criticism of modern surveillance techniques. Both novels are considered his masterpieces.

Orwell spent the last three years of his life in hospitals due to his fragile health. Finally, he died on January 21, 1950 in London, at the age of forty-six, of tuberculosis. His remains rest in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, England.