Literature · Novelists

George Orwell

1903–1950 · English (born in British India)

Political fiction; dystopian novel; essayist

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, a novelist, essayist and journalist whose plain prose was aimed against totalitarianism of left and right. His fable Animal Farm and dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four gave the language Big Brother, doublethink and Room 101, and the adjective "Orwellian".

How to spot them

▸Real name Eric Arthur Blair; pen name taken from the River Orwell in Suffolk
▸Big Brother, Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Room 101, Winston Smith
▸Napoleon, Snowball and Boxer on Manor Farm; 'some animals are more equal than others'
▸Fought with the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War and was shot in the throat
▸Wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Hebridean island of Jura

Key works

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)

First book: memoir of poverty as a plongeur in Paris and a tramp in England

Burmese Days (1934)

Novel of British colonial life in Burma, drawing on his years in the Indian Imperial Police

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

Report on working-class life in Lancashire and Yorkshire, published by the Left Book Club

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Account of fighting for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War

Animal Farm (1945)

Fable of a farm revolution betrayed by the pigs, allegorising Stalin's Soviet Union

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Winston Smith rebels against Big Brother and the Party in Airstrip One, Oceania

Politics and the English Language (1946)

Essay attacking vague, euphemistic political prose, ending with six rules for writers

Shooting an Elephant (1936)

Essay about a colonial policeman in Burma who kills an elephant to avoid looking a fool

Key ideas

'Orwellian' describes state surveillance, propaganda and the manipulation of truth
Newspeak and doublethink: controlling language in order to control thought
'Why I Write' (1946): what he most wanted was 'to make political writing into an art'
A democratic socialist who opposed both fascism and Soviet communism

Quick-fire facts

•Born in Motihari, Bengal Presidency, India, in 1903; educated at Eton
•Served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927
•Room 101 is said to be named after a meeting room at the BBC, where he worked from 1941 to 1943
•Wrote the 'As I Please' column as literary editor of Tribune
•Animal Farm was rejected by several publishers, including T. S. Eliot at Faber
•Died of tuberculosis at University College Hospital, London, in January 1950, aged 46
•Buried at All Saints' churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, under the name Eric Arthur Blair
•The Orwell Prize for political writing is named after him
•An early user of the term 'cold war', in his 1945 essay 'You and the Atom Bomb'

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Sources

The Orwell Foundation — Orwell
Bernard Crick — George Orwell: A Life