George Orwell Biographie

Biography of George Orwell:

Orwell,George,pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), British writer, whose brilliant reporting and political conscience fashioned and impassioned pictures of his life and times.

Orwell was born on June 25,1903, in Montihari, India, and was educated in England at Eton College.He served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927,when he returned to England. In poor health, and striving to become a writer, he lived for several years in poverty, first in Paris and then in London. Out of this experience came his first book, Down and out in Paris and London (1933), a description of the sordid conditions of the homeless poor.

Burmese Days (1934), an indictment of imperialism, is also largely autobiographical.

In 1936 Orwell joined the Republican forces in the Spanish civil war. The description of his experiences, in Homage to Catalonia (1938), forms one of the most moving accounts of this war ever written.

Also belonging to this period is The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a harrowing report on the conditions of unemployed coal miners in the north of England.

Orwell’s political convictions then underwent a profound change. His condemnation of totalitarian societyis expressed in the brilliantly witty allegorical fable Animal Farm (1945)

and in the satirical novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). He latter presents a terrifying picture

of life under the constant surveillance of “Big Brother“.

Among Orwell’s other writings, all basically autobiographical, are the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936); Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950), considering models of expository prose; and Such, Such were the Joys (1953), recalling the hardships of his school days. He Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell was published in four volumes in 1968.

Orwell died in London, on January 21, 1950, of tuberculosis.