Orwell Dies at 46: Big Brother's Creator Silenced

He was dying of tuberculosis when he finished Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell wrote most of it on the island of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides, alone in a farmhouse called Barnhill with no electricity, no telephone, and no central heating. He arrived in 1946, already ill, and spent two years working on the novel in conditions that accelerated his decline. Jura was remote even by Scottish standards. The nearest town was a long drive on unpaved roads. Orwell chose it because he wanted isolation to write, and because the Scottish air was supposed to help his lungs. It didn't. He was so ill during the final draft that he typed it himself, in bed, because he couldn't find a typist willing to travel to Jura. He finished the manuscript in December 1948 and collapsed shortly after. The novel was published on June 8, 1949, by Secker & Warburg. It sold 50,000 copies in its first year. The terms it introduced, Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, the Thought Police, entered the language so completely that most people who use them have never read the book. Orwell intended it as a warning about totalitarianism in all its forms, not just Soviet communism. He was a democratic socialist who had fought fascists in Spain and watched Stalinists betray their own allies. He died on January 21, 1950, at University College Hospital in London, seven months after publication. He was 46. Tuberculosis had eaten through both lungs. He'd been planning to travel to a sanatorium in Switzerland; he never made it. He married Sonia Brownell in his hospital bed three months before he died. Animal Farm, his other masterpiece, had been rejected by twelve publishers before Frederick Warburg accepted it. T. S. Eliot at Faber turned it down, writing that the book's message was not what England needed at a time when Russia was an ally. Orwell kept the rejection letter.