George Orwell

George Orwell

Orwell was born in the northern part of India. Specifically, he was born in Motihari, Bengal in 1903. Next year, his mother, Ida, brought him to England without his father because he had to work for the Opium Department of the Civil Service, and it was until 1907 that Richard, father of George, went with them to England for three months before he had to go back to India. His real name is Eric Arthur Blair, but he is known as the novelist George Orwell. The Blair’s family was composed by three siblings and the parents. The oldest sister’s name was Marjorie, and the youngest Avril. Eric oftenly described his family as a lower-upper-middle class.

He went to school in Henley, and there he was recommended to go to one of the most popular preparatory schools in the country: St. Cyprian’s School, in Eastbourne, Sussex. In that school, he got a scholarship that allowed him to study for only half of the real cost of that preparatory. He then went to Wellington College for a term, and then he decided to go to Eton College. He was often described by the academics as a poor students, but some other academics denied that opinion. During his time at school, he made lifetime relationships that will help him become the writer that he was, because many of those relationships were British intellectuals.

After finishing his studies, he then entered to the police in Burma. He decided to confront Franco’s Nationalist uprising, and he was working for the Republicans as a volunteer. In may 1937, he was shot in the neck. Then, with his wife, Eileen, left Spain.  

Orwell was a socialist and participated in the Spanish Civil War with the republican team. During the second World War II he took part inside the Home Guard and participated on the English radio. In general, all of his work reflected their political and moral positions because it meant the fight between man and the social rules that the government established. His most popular novels are “Animal Farm” (1945) and “1984” (1949), they both were fictions where he described a new kind of society controlled wholly by bureaucratic and political methods and both are framed in the genre of anti-utopian literature.

A dystopia or anti-utopia is a society characterized by a focus on that which is contrary to the author's ethos, such as mass poverty, public mistrust and suspicion, a police state or oppression.

On  “Animal Farm” (1945) Orwell parodied the model of the Soviet socialism: the characters were farm animals that revealed against their owners, men, but then they created a social structure worse than the one that they already have; Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and other figures of the Soviet political scene were represented by these animals.

The second novel takes as title the year in which the action is located: 1984, on it he imagined a fiction as nightmarish as in the previous one, a world governed by great powers: Eurasia, Oceania and East Asia. That fictional society was divided on different entities and each entity has a specified job to keep the social welfare. The main character lived in the Ministry of truth and he had to follow some rules like speak in a certain way and the feelings and pleasures were prohibited; the he felt in love and he tried to change that social structure.

Orwell's prose is realistic and have a great narrative quality. He was the first British author to write about the social policy problems of London.

Orwell wrote the last pages of “1983” in a remote house on the Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds of Animal Farm. He worked between hours of hospitalization for tuberculosis, of which he died in a London hospital in January 1950. David Astor, a friend of his, saw that he was buried in the small county churchyard, and he was buried with his original name.

References:

George Orwell. (2012). FamousAuthors.org. Retrieved 04:07, September 18, 2017 from http://www.famousauthors.org/george-orwell

Anonimus. (2014). George Orwell. September 18, 2017, de Biografias y Vidas Sitio web: https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/o/orwell.htm

N/A. (2017). Biography of George Orwell. 18/09/2017, de Gradesaver Sitio web: http://www.gradesaver.com/author/george-orwell