Fast Facts
top Questions
What did George Orwell write ?
George Orwell wrote the political legend Animal Farm ( 1944 ), the anti-utopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four ( 1949 ), the unorthodox political treatise The Road to Wigan Pier ( 1937 ), and the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London ( 1933 ), which contains essays that recount actual events in a novelize human body .
Where was George Orwell educated ?
George Orwell won scholarships to two of England ’ s precede schools, Wellington and Eton colleges. He briefly attended the early before transferring to the latter, where Aldous Huxley was one of his teachers. rather of going on to a university, Orwell entered the british Imperial service and worked as a colonial patrol military officer .
What was George Orwell ’ s family like ?
George Orwell was brought up in an atmosphere of deprive snobbery, first in India and then in England. His forefather was a minor british official in the Indian civil service and his mother was the daughter of an abortive teak merchant. Their attitudes were those of the “ landless gentry. ”
Why was George Orwell celebrated ?
George Orwell wrote two enormously influential novels : Animal Farm ( 1944 ), a sarcasm that allegorically depicted Joseph Stalin ’ s betrayal of the russian Revolution of 1917, and Nineteen Eighty-four ( 1949 ), a chilling admonition against dictatorship. The latter deeply impress readers with ideas that entered mainstream culture in a direction achieved by few books. George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, ( born June 25, 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India—died January 21, 1950, London, England ), english novelist, essayist, and critic celebrated for his novels Animal Farm ( 1945 ) and nineteen Eighty-four ( 1949 ), the latter a fundamental anti- utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule. Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never wholly abandoned his original name, but his foremost koran, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell ( the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia ). In time his nom de preen became so close attached to him that few people but relatives knew his very name was Blair. The variety in name corresponded to a profound lurch in Orwell ’ second life style, in which he changed from a pillar of the british imperial establishment into a literary and political insurgent .
Early life
Learn about the life and works of George Orwell Questions and answers about English writer George Orwell .Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.See all videos for this article He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahib. His father was a minor british official in the Indian civil service ; his mother, of french extraction, was the daughter of an abortive teak merchant in Burma ( Myanmar ). Their attitudes were those of the “ landless gentry, ” deoxyadenosine monophosphate Orwell late called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social condition had short relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverish snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual magnificence. He grew up a dark, withdraw, bizarre son, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical try, such, such Were the Joys ( 1953 ).
Orwell won scholarships to two of England ’ s leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and concisely attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first write in college periodicals. rather of matriculating at a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant zone superintendent in the indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of state stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial handmaid. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the british, he felt increasingly ashamed of his function as a colonial police officeholder. late he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brainy autobiographical sketches, “ Shooting an elephant ” and “ A Hanging, ” classics of expository prose .
Against imperialism
In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive gradation of resigning from the imperial patrol. already in the fall of 1927 he had started on a naturally of natural process that was to shape his fictional character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of raceway and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life sentence of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East end of London to live in cheap housing houses among labourers and beggars ; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in french hotels and restaurants ; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields. Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fabrication. The book ’ sulfur publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell ’ s first novel, burmese Days ( 1934 ), established the radiation pattern of his subsequent fabrication in its depiction of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally disjunct individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. The chief character of burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the drab and narrow-minded chauvinism of his chap british colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unanticipated personal tragedy. The supporter of Orwell ’ s following fresh, A Clergyman ’ south Daughter ( 1935 ), is an unhappy spinner who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agrarian labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying ( 1936 ) is about a literarily inclined bookseller ’ sulfur adjunct who despises the empty commerce and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girlfriend he loves. Orwell ’ mho repugnance against imperialism led not entirely to his personal rejection of the bourgeois life style but to a political reorientation as good. immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do sol for respective years ; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist, though he was excessively libertarian in his think ever to take the far step—so common in the period—of declaring himself a communist.
