George Orwell
(1903–1950)

Although George Orwell's popular fame is most directly linked to his two novels of political satire, Animal Farm and 1984, many discerning readers insist that his genius is most readily apparent in his essays and nonfictions. Orwell's prose style—precise yet informal—contributed to making his essays some of the most eloquent short pieces in English writing of the 20th century.

George Orwell was the pen name chosen by Eric Blair, born in colonial Bengal, an eastern region of India. Schooled in England at Eton, Orwell returned to the East—like H. H. Munro (Saki)—to serve in the Imperial Police in Burma. His experiences in that post, which span the years 1922 to 1927, form the basis of his first novel Burmese Days (1934). Disillusioned by his country's policy in the Orient, Orwell left military service to pursue jobs in journalism, publishing, and bookselling in England and France. This period of his life was marked by struggles with poverty, as he recalls in his autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

During the 1930s, Orwell became deeply involved in social and international causes. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) movingly chronicles the miseries of the English working class during the later phases of the Depression. The coming of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) found Orwell firmly committed to the Republican cause. Deploring what he saw as the totalitarianism of the Nationalist victors of the conflict, Orwell paid tribute to the victims in Homage to Catalonia (1939).

During World War II, Orwell served as literary editor of the Tribune from 1943 to 1945 and also contributed political columns to a number of newspapers and journals. In 1945, he published Animal Farm, a savage fable that indirectly denounces the evils of both Fascism and Communism. Suffering acutely from the tuberculosis that would ultimately end his life, he completed 1984 (1948), a grim vision of a future in which language and thought would be everywhere manipulated to serve totalitarian ends.

Orwell's passionate concern for the preservation of political freedom was allied with his efforts to save the English language from "double speak," jargon, and bureaucratic vagueness. In Politics and the English Language he dramatically demonstrates how language can be used subtly to conceal political corruption, thereby blinding members of a society to the necessity of moral choice. Although 1984 has come and gone without the fulfillment of Orwell's grim prophecies, his lifelong commitment to political freedom and to the integrity of language remain as relevant today as ever.

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