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"On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time" – George Orwell.
George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in India. Like many
of the children of the British army and colonial civil service, he was educated
at boarding school in England, in his case at Eton. His family could not affprd a university education for him, so he joined the
Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. He resigned in 1927 with
the aim of becoming a writer and moved to Paris in 1928, publishing his first
book, Down and Out in Paris and London, five years later which recorded
his years working menial jobs to support himself as a writer. Shortly
after this, he took the name George Orwell, publishing Burmese Days in
1934.
An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the mid 1930s he considered himself a
socialist. In 1936 he was commissioned to write an account of poverty
among unemployed miners in northern England, which was published as The Road
to Wigan Pier (1937). In 1936 he traveled to Spain with the intent of
fighting for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists, but he fled in fear
of his life in the face of Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing
revolutionary socialist dissenters - this experience turned him into a lifelong
anti-Stalinist.
Between 1941 and 1943, he worked in the BBC's propaganda department, before
becoming literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine.
1945 saw the publication of Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four was published four years later. Although the former is a political fable based
on Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution and the latter is set in an
imaginary totalitarian future, Emma Larkin's
Finding George Orwell in Burma notes that all three books resonate with the people of Burma who say that Orwell did not write just one book about their country, but three: Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
He died of tuberculosis in January 1950 at the age of 47.
This quote & biography originally ran in an issue of BookBrowse's membership magazine. Full Membership Features & Benefits.
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