George Orwell - something about him :) and about some of his books :)

The British author George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair was an uncompromising individualist and political idealist. Novels, documentaries, essays and criticism he wrote during the 1930s and later has established him as one of the most important and influential voices of the century.
He was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, in the then British colony of India as the second child of Richard Walmesley Blair and Ida Mabel Limonzin. His father was a civil servant in the opium department and his mother was the daughter of a tea–merchant in Burma. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie and a younger sister named Avril. With his characteristic humor, he would later describe his family’s background as ‘upper–lower–middle–class’. In 1904 he moved with his mother and sister to England.
Young Eric attended St Cyprian’s on a scholarship that allowed his parents to pay only half of the usual fees. He did there well enough to earn scholarships to both Wellington and Eton colleges. After a term at Wellington, Eric moved to Eton, where he was a King’s Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Later in life he wrote that he had been ‘relatively happy’ at Eton, which allowed its students considerable independence. During these years Blair developed his antipathy towards the English class system.
At the age of seventeen Eric had his first experience as an ‘amateur tramp’ in Plymouth, where he was stranded accidentally without much money.
After Blair failing to win a scholarship to university, Blair went in 1922 to Burma to serve in the Indian Imperial Police (1922 – 1927) as an assistant superintendent. In 1928 he returned to Europe and lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work. In 1928 he decided to became a writer, but his first amateurish efforts arose smiles. A poet friend described him ‘like a cow with a musket’.
Eric assumed his pseudonym in 1933, while writing for the New Adelphi. He chose the pen name that stressed his deep, lifelong affection for the English tradition and countryside: George is the patron saint of England (and George V was monarch at the time), while the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of his most beloved English sites.
In 1930s Blair had adopted socialistic views. Like many others writers, he traveled to Spain to report on the Civil War. He fought alongside the United Workers Marxist Party militia and was shot in the neck by a Francoist sniper’s bullet. When Stalinists on their own side started to hunt down Anarchists and his friends were thrown into prison, Blair escaped with his wife from the chaos. The war made him a strong opposer of communism and an advocate of the English brand of socialism.
During the World War II Orwell served as a sergeant in the Home Guard and worked as a journalist for the BBC, Observer and Tribune, where he was literary editor from 1943 to 1945. After the war, Orwell went to Germany as a reporter, but in his dispatches he sent to Observer and The Manchester Evening News he did not mention the extermination camps or Auschwitz.
In 1936 Orwell married Eileen O’Shaugnessy and they had adopted a little boy – Richard Horatio Blair. His wife died in 1945 during the operation. Four years later he married Sonia Brownell. However, her marriage to Orwell lasted only free months. The writer died from tuberculosis in London University Hospital on January 21, 1950.


George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist and critic, famous for his political satire – an anti–Soviet tale. However, during most of his career Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books of reportage such as “Homage to Catalonia” which appeared in 1938 after some troubles with its publication. In the book he described his admiration for the apparent absence of a class structure in the revolutionary areas of Spain he visited; or “Down and Out in Paris and London” – Foundation of that book gave Orwell’s experience in poverty. However, the author was never full–time vagrant, but he stayed every now and then with his older sister or with his parents, and plunged to the lower depths of society like an explorer. ‘The Paris slums are a gathering – place for eccentric people – people who are fallen into solitary, half–mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.’
Orwell is also known for his views on the political implications of the use of language. In the essay “Politics and the English Language”, he decries the effects of clich, bureaucratic euphemism and academic jargon on literary styles. Orwell’s concern over the power of language to shape reality is also reflected in his invention of Newspeak – the official language of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel “Nineteen Eighty–Four”. A number of words and phrases coined in that book have entered the standard vocabulary, such as “memory hole”, “Big Brother”, “Room 101”, “ newspeak”.
However, Orwell is more often introduced to the readers as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles: “Animal Farm” and “1984”.
“1984” was a bitter protest against the nightmarish future and corruption of truth and free speech of the modern world, in which society is dominated by such slogans as ‘War is Peace’, ‘Freedom is Slavery’, ‘Ignorance is Strength’.
“Animal Farm” is a satirical allegory of Russian Revolution, particularly directed against Stalin’s policies. Led by the pigs, Animals on Mr. Jones’s farm revolt against their human masters. After their victory they decide to take run the farm themselves on. But the pigs soon become leaders and say that: ‘All animals are equal but some animals are more equal then others’. ‘Animal Farm’ present a socialist viewpoint: the system is good, but the individuals are corruptible. What is the most important, the story shows us, how noble ideals of freedom, happy life, fairness, equality are transforming into totalitarianism; how communist society can fail when its leaders let down.