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Early Life:
Eric Authur Blair who is known as George Orwell was born June 25, 1903 in Motihari, India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair worked in the Indian Civil service and his mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin Blair was just a housewife. She then decided to move the family back to England when George Orwell was just around one year old. Orwell always described how his family was a part of the “lower-upper-middle” class because they struggled to keep the appearance of great wealth. The effect of him being a part of all these social classes inspired the creation of a lot of his books in the future. Orwell would then go on to attend Eton college where he was a bright but rebellious student, he was known to reject the upper class in his classes and cause problems. After he graduated he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in the year 1922. He worked for the police for 5 years and in those years he was exposed to the harsh realities of how British Imperialism took over and it led to the growth of his distrust and hatred towards big authorities and oppression, which he would later write about in his novels. When he finally resigned from police work he decided to return back to England to become a writer by the name of George Orwell.
Becoming an Author:
George Orwell’s journey to becoming an author started young when that's what he wanted to be when he grew up. Even though that dream died out, his education, experiences, and the connections to the struggles people deal with everyday led to him coming back to that dream he had when he was a kid. Through his scholarships he achieved to Wellington and then to Eton College, he was able to see the hypocrisies the British upper class preached about. With all of the experiences he had from his peers who were a part of the upper class in school and seeing it throughout the news he was able to find the illusion in how they were and really notice how bad it was. He was inspired to write a story about his school days that was made to expose all the cruelty and injustice he experienced and observed while going to school. After he left the school he surrounded himself with the poor and oppressed working class and lived among them in London and Paris. This shaped his compassion and his urge to write and it led to him creating early autobiographical sketches like “Down and Out in Paris and London”. He then married his first wife Eileen Blair. They were married from 1936 a year after they first met up until her death in 1945. During that marriage the couple adopted one son by the name of Richard Blair. She was also his first editor and reader. After he married he then started a magazine and began to write essays that were a reflection on his growing political beliefs and awareness to help try and create a sense of social justice. With this it led to him becoming deeply critical of the Labour Party because he believes that the party betrayed the working class by creating bureaucratic systems instead of trying to challenge the inequalities they were faced with. The essay he wrote “The Road to Wigan Pier” (1937) was a direct correlation to the harshness of the industrial life he experienced and saw in north England. Trying to make a change he went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to try and fight against the facism he saw but later had to flee because his socialist group was persecuted by their rival leftist groups.
Life as an author/About his pieces:
George Orwell was an author who was always defined as a social critique using his deep connection to people and commitment to finding the truth. Using his experiences in the British Empire and living among the working class he would work to produce novels that showed the corruption of power in the British Empire and the struggles ordinary people had to go through. His first big novel “Burmese Days (1934)” was based on how his life was as a police officer in colonial Burma and it exposed the racism and decay caused by the imperial rule. He then wrote “A Clergyman’s Daughter(1935)” and “Keep the Aspidistra Flyting (1936)” where he would explore the social issues he saw and show the effect that class, money, and status had on people. In “Coming Up for Air (1939)” Orwell would show the loss of innocence and the horrors of how the world was drifting into a war because of corruption that people don’t see. His most famous works “Animal Farm (1945)” and “1984 (1949)” would be the ones that put him into history and ultimately distinguish him as one of the most influential authors of all time. “Animal Farm” was a fable on a farm of animals that would show the corruption of the revolutionizing ideals that the Soviet Union was putting in place and was simply a warning on how totalism would lead to the downfall of freedom and corruption for people. “1984” was his prediction of a horrifying future where the world was under constant surveillance and how the use of propaganda can lead to absolute control of the people. At the end of his life he remarried to Sonia Brownell when he was in the hospital on October 13th, 1949. She was a literary editor and they were married for three months before his death.
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