George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote as George Orwell (1903–1950), was an English novelist, essayist and journalist. He is best known for the satirical fable Animal Farm and the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, and for plain-spoken writing against totalitarianism.

1 published book 0 published articles

About George Orwell

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, born in 1903 in Motihari, India, who died in London in January 1950. He served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927, came home, lived in self-imposed poverty and became a socialist.

He wrote novels, but he was just as much a reporter and essayist. Poverty and class run through Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), the second written after publisher Victor Gollancz sent him to see unemployment in northern England. Homage to Catalonia (1938) recounts his time fighting in Spain. In 1946 he wrote that everything serious he had written since 1936 was against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism. His prose is plain on purpose, and his essay Politics and the English Language argues the case for it.

Animal Farm came out from Secker and Warburg on 17 August 1945, after several publishers turned it down. Time later put it on its list of the 100 best English-language novels, and it received a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996. Nineteen Eighty-Four followed in 1949 and gave English the adjective Orwellian. The Orwell Foundation, a charity, now runs the Orwell Prize for political writing in his name.

Start with Animal Farm. It is short, subtitled A Fairy Story, and the farmyard revolt that slides into tyranny is easy to follow before you notice how closely it tracks the Soviet Union under Stalin. Orwell himself called it a book against Stalin. If you like it, read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the full-length nightmare, then Homage to Catalonia to see where his convictions came from.

Published books

Author

1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949 and widely sold simply as 1984, is George Orwell's last completed novel and one of the most influential dystopian novels in English. It follows Winston Smith, a minor Party functionary in a London that has become Airstrip One, part of the superstate Oceania. His job is to alter the written record so that the Party is never wrong. Private doubt, a forbidden love affair and a craving for verifiable truth push him toward rebellion against a regime that polices thought as well as behaviour. Orwell's concern is less prediction than diagnosis: how a state can seek control over language, memory and belief itself. This Signet paperback presents the novel with a new introduction and afterword that mark its seventy-fifth anniversary.

View book