George Orwell

Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, was born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal to his parents Richard and Ida. His father was a civil servant of the opium department. He attended school in England after moving there with his mother and sister in 1904. Blair served for the Indian Imperial Police from 1922 to 1927 in Burma. During his time served he began to strongly dislike imperial rule, and finally resigned. Blair then moved back to Europe and worked low paying jobs. He once got himself arrested , because he wanted to know what it was like to be in jail. Blair took up writing and began to teach at a private school, then he worked as a shop keeper. In 1936 he married his wife Eileen. In the 1930’s Blair showed himself to be very socialist, he traveled to Spain to write about the Civil War, fought with the United Workers Marxist Party militia. During that time he was shot in the throat, he then escaped with his wife. He began to have a stronger opposition of communism. Blair served as a sergeant in the Home Guard and worked as a journalist for BBC during World War II. After the war Blair moved to Scotland and adopted a son with Eileen, who passed away in 1945. He then married his second wife Sonia and three months later he died of tuberculosis, soon after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, (Liukkonen).
As a writer Blair used his various life experiences to add to the novels and writings that he did. The best explanation of Blair’s experience playing a role in his literary works is in his essay “Why I Write,” “First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision,” (Merriman). All of these events in Blair’s life went toward his growing hatred of any type of authority. This attitude towards authority is the prominent theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Blair’s main focus of writing was the different parts of society. He would put himself into various situations, so that he could provide a first hand account in his writings. Blair’s main concern was the ills and negative aspects of life and society, and the opinions he acquired through lie experience are shown through his many literary works, and prominently Nineteen Eighty-Four.

George Orwell

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