Orwell, George

Orwell, George, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–50), born in Bengal, and educated at Eton (with Connolly). He served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, 1922–7, and drew on his experiences in Burmese Days (1934). He returned to Europe, living in a state of ‘fairly severe poverty’, as reflected in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). His second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), was followed by Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), which recounts the literary aspirations, financial humiliations, and shotgun wedding of a bookseller's assistant. A journey north in 1936 produced his impassioned documentary of unemployment and proletarian life, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and the Spanish Civil War (in which he fought for the republicans and was wounded) produced Homage to Catalonia (1938). The threat of war hung over his next novel, Coming up for Air (1939).

By then Orwell saw himself primarily as a political writer, a democratic socialist, who hated totalitarianism. Reviewing his The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941), Pritchett compared him to Defoe and Cobbett both for his ‘subversive, non-conforming brand of patriotism’ and for his ‘lucid conversational style’. His collections of essays include Inside the Whale (1940), Critical Essays (1946), and Shooting an Elephant (1950). But his most popular works were his political satires Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought inevitable comparisons with Swift. His first wife, Eileen, died in 1945, and he married Sonia Mary Brownell in 1949, shortly before his death from tuberculosis. His Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (4 vols, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus) appeared in 1968 and his Complete Works (20 vols, ed. Peter Davison) in 1998. See also George Orwell: A Life (1980) by Bernard Crick.