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Jun 24, 2024 · Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in a gloomy mood while he was dealing with sickness, deeply worried both for himself and for the state of the world. In particular, he was concerned that objective truth was withering away. The novel is, among many other things, about loss. The loss of truth. The loss of memory.
- Overview
- Early life
- Against imperialism
- From The Road to Wigan Pier to World War II
George Orwell wrote the political fable Animal Farm (1944), the anti-utopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the unorthodox political treatise The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), which contains essays that recount actual events in a fictionalized form.
Where was George Orwell educated?
George Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and Eton colleges. He briefly attended the former before transferring to the latter, where Aldous Huxley was one of his teachers. Instead of going on to a university, Orwell entered the British Imperial service and worked as a colonial police officer.
What was George Orwell’s family like?
George Orwell was brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery, first in India and then in England. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service and his mother was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant. Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry.”
Why was George Orwell famous?
He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953).
Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of matriculating at a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging,” classics of expository prose.
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In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields.
Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. The main character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell’s next novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves.
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Orwell’s first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing.
By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the Republican militia, serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel, with damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness. Later, in May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists who were trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which many consider one of his best books.
Oct 30, 2001 · It is used as a noun to describe an admirer and conscious follower of his work. Occasionally, it is deployed as a complimentary adjective, to mean something like "displaying outspoken intellectual honesty, like Orwell." Very few other writers have garnered this double tribute of becoming both adjective and noun.
Jun 8, 2019 · No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984. The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the ...
Sep 28, 2023 · Here are compelling reasons why the 1984 novel should be on everyone’s reading list: The Ever-Present Eye of Surveillance. From dystopian tales to political commentaries, the literary world is brimming with masterpieces that offer profound insights into the human condition. Yet, few books have captivated readers, educators, and critics alike ...
Jul 15, 2021 · Orwell then outlines what he sees as four chief motives for anyone becoming a writer: 1) egoism; 2) aesthetic enthusiasm; 3) historical impulse; and 4) political purpose. Egoism is the desire to be thought clever, be talked about when alive, and remembered after death. Aesthetic enthusiasm is the perception of beauty in the world around the ...
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Jun 25, 2012 · Why Writers Write: George Orwell on the Four Universal Motives for Creative Work. By Maria Popova. Literary legend Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell (June 25, 1903–January 21, 1950), remains best remembered for authoring the cult-classics Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he was also a formidable, masterful essayist.
