Orwell, George

Orwell, George (1903–50). Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, embodied the hopes and aspirations of the left in the 1930s, and the subsequent post-war disillusionment. His career began as a policeman in Burma, but in 1927 he returned to England to be a writer. The experience of poverty enabled him to write Down and Out in Paris and London (1930); Burmese Days (1931) followed. Based on personal experiences, it was critical of the British empire. But Orwell's breakthrough came when he was commissioned by Gollancz of the Left Book Club to write a study of poverty in England. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) was a brilliantly emotive impression of working-class life.

The experience of fighting with the POUM militia against fascists in Spain, which almost led to his death, cemented Orwell's socialist ideas. Homage to Catalonia (1938), which aroused great hostility, was a graphic description of the Spanish revolution. Animal Farm (1945), the result of these experiences, launched an acerbic satirical attack on Stalinism. His final book, written in solitude on the Isle of Jura, was 1984 (1949), a grim warning of the dangers of totalitarianism. Over the course of his life Orwell developed a distinctive and quintessentially English revolutionary libertarian socialism of his own, which continued to inspire long after his life was cut short by tuberculosis in 1950.

Lewis Mates