George Orwell

1903–1950

George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic best known for his books Animal Farm and 1984. He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his time, including imperialism, fascism, and communism. His foresight into how easily a democracy can slide into totalitarianism inspired the word “Orwellian,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, especially the totalitarian state he wrote about in 1984. Beyond his literary career, Orwell worked as an officer for the India Imperial Police Force and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He died in 1950 at age 46 after suffering from tuberculosis for many years.

FULL NAME: Eric Arthur Blair
BORN: June 25, 1903
DIED: January 21, 1950
BIRTHPLACE: Motihari, India
SPOUSES: Eileen Blair (1936–1945) and Sonia Brownwell (1949–1950)
CHILD: Richard
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer

George Orwell was the pseudonym for Eric Arthur Blair, who was born in Motihari, India, on June 25, 1903. His father, Richard Blair, was a British civil servant stationed in India. About a year after he was born, Orwell’s mother, Ida Limouzin, brought him and his older sister, Marjorie, to Henley-on-Thames, England, while Orwell’s father stayed in India. Richard rarely visited his family, though a younger sister, Avril, was born in 1908. Orwell didn’t know his father until he retired from the service in 1912. The pair never formed a strong bond, as Orwell found his father to be dull and conservative.

According to one biography, Orwell’s first word was “beastly.” He was a sick child, often battling bronchitis and the flu.

Orwell took up writing at an early age, reportedly composing his first poem around age 4. He later wrote, “I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.” One of his first literary successes came at the age of 11 when he had a poem published in the local newspaper.

Like many other boys in England, Orwell was sent to boarding school at a very young age. In 1911, when he was 8, he went to St. Cyprian’s in the coastal town of Eastbourne, where he got his first taste of England’s class system. On a partial scholarship, Orwell noticed that the school treated richer students better than poorer ones. He wasn’t popular with his peers and found comfort from his difficult situation in books, especially the works of Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells.

What he lacked in personality, he made up for in smarts. Orwell won scholarships to Wellington College and Eton College to continue his studies.

After completing his schooling at Eton, Orwell found himself at a dead end. His family didn’t have the money to pay for a university education. Instead, he joined the India Imperial Police Force in 1922 and was sent to Burma (now Myanmar), then a British colony. Orwell hated this job and called imperialism “an evil thing.” As a representative of imperialism, he was disliked by locals. One day, although he didn’t think it necessary, he killed a working elephant in front of a crowd of locals just to “avoid looking a fool.”

After five years, Orwell resigned his post in 1927 and returned to England to begin writing. His first novel and one of his most well known essays, “Shooting an Elephant,” describe his time as police officer in Myanmar. The 1936 essay was published in literary magazine New Writing and later became the title piece in a 1950 collection of Orwell’s essays that included “My Country Right or Left,“ “How the Poor Die,” and “Such, Such were the Joys.”

Despite being horrified by what he experienced in Burma, Orwell was politically engaged throughout his life and always took the side of the exploited. Like many authors of his day, including Federico Garcia Lorca and Ernest Hemingway, in December 1936, he traveled to Spain to join the fight against General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. At one point, Orwell was shot in the throat and arm and was unable to speak for several weeks. He remained in Spain for six months before fleeing back to England, now with a decidedly anti-communist worldview.

Orwell reflected on his experiences during the war in the memoir-adjacent Homage to Catalonia (1938). The nonfiction book explored the various factions and sides engaged in the battle for Spain, including the Soviet Union–backed Republicans who lost to Franco. In the book, Orwell shared his disappointment in the Stalinist communists, whom, he realizes, care more about power than political equality, and he decried the devolution into violence when matters could be settled peacefully.

Intent as he was on becoming a professional writer, Orwell struggled to get his writing career off the ground and took all sorts of jobs to make ends meet, including being a dishwasher. He worried that his writing would embarrass his family so he adopted the pseudonym George Orwell prior to the publication of his first book, the nonfiction autobiographical work Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1933. The pen name stuck.

Much of his early writing drew on his own experiences and explored the lives of the working poor and people living a transient existence. Later on, Orwell encouraged others to question authority and the ways language controls citizens through his nonfiction books, novels, essays, and radio broadcasts.

Sometimes called the conscience of a generation, Orwell is best known for two novels: Animal Farm and 1984. Both books, published toward the end of Orwell’s life, are often assigned to middle and high schoolers so they can learn about literary styles as well as satire and political criticism.

Themes across Orwell’s works remain relevant today, as they warned about so much that would happen in the future, with some ideas becoming modern realities. But his writing also mattered because, instead of taking a side for either conservative or liberal thinking, he pointed out it was politics and the language of politics at the heart of both war and peace. For example, he wrote, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship” and “In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

His six novels are:

Beyond fiction, Orwell continued writing nonfiction through books, numerous essays, and reviews. One notable example is 1937’s The Road to Wigan Pier, in which Orwell explored the divide between north and south Britain along class lines and, as a socialist, blamed the class system for the terrible conditions in which poor people lived, especially the coal miners in northern England. The political work argued for a change in attitude given that many people at the time supported fascism because they hated the ruling class and the thinking behind socialism and communism.

In 1941, Orwell landed a producer job with the BBC and developed news commentary and shows for audiences in the eastern part of the British Empire. Literary greats such as T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster appeared on his programs.

With World War II raging on, Orwell found himself acting as a propagandist for the BBC, helping advance the country’s national interest. He loathed this part of his job, describing the company’s atmosphere in his diary as “something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless.”

Orwell resigned in 1943, saying “I was wasting my own time and the public money on doing work that produces no result. I believe that in the present political situation the broadcasting of British propaganda to India is an almost hopeless task.”

Around this time, Orwell became the literary editor for a socialist newspaper. He developed a reputation for producing well-crafted literary criticism and remains as respected for his political thinking and essays as he is for his most famous books. “Politics and the English Language,” an essay published in the April 1946 issue of the British literary magazine Horizon, is considered one of Orwell’s most important works on style. He wrote that “ugly and inaccurate” English enables oppressive ideology and that leaders use vague or meaningless language meant to hide the truth. To write well is to be able to think clearly and engage in political discourse, he argued. He also railed against cliches, dying metaphors, and pretentious or meaningless language.

Over the years, there has been a lot of speculation about Orwell’s attitude toward sex and the social roles of men and women, especially because of its use as a plot point and symbol in 1984.

In his personal life, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaughnessy in June 1936. Eileen supported and assisted Orwell in his career and personal life, though she mostly remained in the background. Although many accounts suggest Orwell wanted an open marriage, the couple remained together until she died on an operating table in 1945. A year prior to her death, the couple adopted a son, whom they named Richard Horatio Blair, after one of Orwell’s ancestors. Their son was largely raised by Orwell’s sister Avril after Eileen’s death.

Near the end of his life, Orwell proposed to editor Sonia Brownell. He married her in October 1949, only a short time before his death. Brownell inherited Orwell’s estate and made a career out of managing his legacy.

For years, Orwell had periods of sickness, and he was officially diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1938. He spent several months at the Preston Hall Sanatorium trying to recover but continued to battle tuberculosis for the rest of his life. At the time he was initially diagnosed, there was no effective treatment for the disease.

Orwell died of tuberculosis in a London hospital on January 21, 1950. Although he was just 46 years old, his ideas and opinions have lived on through his work.

Despite Orwell’s disdain for the BBC during his life, a statue of the writer was commissioned by artist Martin Jennings and installed outside the BBC in London. An inscription reads, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” The eight-foot bronze statue, paid for by the George Orwell Memorial Fund, was unveiled in November 2017.

“Would he have approved of it? It’s an interesting question. I think he would have been reserved, given that he was very self-effacing,” Orwell’s son, Richard, told The Daily Telegraph. “In the end I think he would have been forced to accept it by his friends. He would have to recognize that he was a man of the moment.”

• In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
• Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
• Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
• Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us!

Donna Raskin

Senior Editor

Since 2010, Donna Raskin, a longtime writer and editor, has taught history classes at the College of New Jersey. As a child, she read and re-read every book in the Childhood of Famous Americans series. As an adult, she collects fashion history books and has traveled to Paris on a fashion history tour. In addition to contributing to Biography.com, she is the senior health and fitness editor at Bicycling and Runner’s World.

Biography.com Editors

Staff Editorial Team and Contributors

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us