ABSTRACT
George Orwell (1903-50), whose real name was Eric Blair, was born in India, the son of a British civil servant. He was educated in England at a prep school and then at Eton. Instead of proceeding to a university, Orwell served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1928, an experience that provided the material for the first of his novels, Burmese Days (1934). For a couple of years, Orwell deliberately allowed himself to sink to the lowest strata of society, subsisting as a tramp and casual labourer, and recorded his experiences in Down and Out in London and Paris (1933). In 1937 he published The Road to Wigan Pier, a semi-autobiographical, semi-documentary study of the effects of economic depression in northern England. In the same year he went to Spain to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and was wounded at the front. As Homage to Catalonia (1938) makes clear, however, the traumatic episode of this experience for Orwell was the Communist purge of rival political elements on the Republican side. From this one may date the hardening of Orwell's distrust of all political parties, institutions, slogans, and his insistence that Stalinist Communism was a totalitarian system as odious as Nazism. In the 'thirties and during World War II this was an unpopular viewpoint in intellectual and literary circles. With the onset of the Cold War, however, the ideas Orwell expressed fictionally in Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), became highly topical, and brought him worldwide fame, which he did not live long to enjoy.
