George Orwell (d. 1950)

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Biography

Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.

Timeline

The story of George Orwell, told in moments.

1903 Birth

Born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, British India. His father works for the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, overseeing opium production for sale to China. His mother takes him to England at age one. He won't see his father again until he's 8.

Your father oversaw opium production in India. Did that hypocrisy shape your politics? What was it like being taken from India to England at age one?

1933 Life

Publishes Down and Out in Paris and London under the pen name George Orwell. He'd spent years deliberately living in poverty: sleeping in flophouses, washing dishes in Paris restaurants, tramping through England. He chose the pen name from the River Orwell in Suffolk. He never used his birth name again publicly.

You deliberately lived in poverty for years. Was that research or self-punishment? Why George Orwell? Was Eric Blair too comfortable a name?

1937 Event

Shot through the throat by a Fascist sniper while fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The bullet misses his carotid artery by millimeters. He can barely speak for weeks. When he returns to Barcelona, his Marxist militia unit has been declared illegal by the Communists. He and his wife flee Spain to avoid arrest.

Shot through the throat by a Fascist sniper. Did you feel lucky or cursed? Your own militia was declared illegal by the Communists you fought alongside. Was that the betrayal that shaped everything?

1945 Event

Animal Farm is published after being rejected by multiple publishers, including one that consulted the British Ministry of Information. T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber turned it down too. The allegory of the Russian Revolution sells 25,000 copies in its first five years in Britain. It's never been out of print.

T.S. Eliot turned down Animal Farm. Was that the most frustrating rejection? Did you expect the allegory to be obvious or did readers miss it?

1949 Event

Nineteen Eighty-Four is published. He wrote most of it on the Scottish island of Jura while dying of tuberculosis. Big Brother, Thought Police, Newspeak, doublethink, Room 101. He gives the English language a vocabulary for totalitarianism. He is 45 and has months to live.

Writing Nineteen Eighty-Four while dying of TB on a Scottish island. Was that desperation or discipline? Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak. Did you know you were giving the language permanent new words?

1950 Death

Dies of a burst artery in his lungs at University College Hospital, London. He is 46. He'd married his second wife, Sonia Brownell, in his hospital room three months earlier. The Times later names him the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

Married in your hospital room three months before dying. Was that hope or farewell? Is there anything Nineteen Eighty-Four got wrong about the future?

In Their Own Words (20)

The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists.

Ch. 10, 1938

I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.

Ch. 10, 1938

No one I met at this time — doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients — failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

Ch. 12, 1938

An immense amount, enough to fill many books, has already been written on the subject [of the Barcelona fighting], and I do not suppose I should exaggerate if I said that nine-tenths of it is untruthful.

Ch. 10, 1938

The essential job is to get people to recognise war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda.

Review of The Men I Killed by Brigadier-General F. P. Crozier, CB, CMG, DSO, in New Statesman and Nation (28 August 1937), 1937