Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, British India, on June 25, 1903. He attended the elite English boarding schools Eastbourne and Eton. He later undertook training to become a police officer, like his father and grandfather, and joined the colonial service, where he worked for the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (now Myanmar). To protest the oppressive colonial rule, he quit the service in 1927 and subsequently struggled to make do in London and Paris, working as a dishwasher, bookseller’s assistant, teacher and journalist. In 1933, he published Down and Out in Paris and London, his autobiographic account of this phase of his life. In 1936, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaughnessy and traveled to Barcelona to join the Spanish Civil War. He fought at the front against Francisco Franco’s fascists, returning to England wounded and disillusioned in the summer of 1937. In 1944, Orwell completed the dystopian novel Animal Farm. It wasn’t published until after World War II, because readers at the time didn’t appreciate the criticism of Great Britain’s ally Stalin. In 1945, Eileen died during a routine operation. In 1948, Orwell, now an independent socialist, finished his work on Nineteen Eight-Four. His second dystopian novel with its terrifyingly hopeless ending made him famous worldwide. In this masterpiece of political-philosophical science fiction, Orwell took his pessimistic view of history to the extreme. Only three months after marrying his second wife, Sonia Mary Brownell, he died of tuberculosis on January 21, 1950, at the age of 46.