Geoge Orwell - Famous English Writer

George Orwell (1903 - 1950) was important prosaist, journalist and essayist. His real name was Eric Blair but since 1930 he used the pseudonym Orwell (a name of an English river). He was born in India into a family of English civil servants. He was sent back to England to be educated at Eton, a prestigious a school for rich boys, so as a scholarship student, he felt the weight of his lower social status. After Eton he went to Burma, where he joined the Imperial Police. His discomfort in this service is captured in his famous essay Shooting the Elephant (1950) and his novel Burmese Days (1934). Orwell felt sympathy for people of lower economic classes. He struggled to survive at low-paying jobs, first in Paris later in London. These experiences are displayed in his next autobiographic novel Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). He sympathised with the socialists, and participated as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, on the side of Republicans. He dedicated his documentary book Homage to Catalonian (1938) to them. However, he was not a follower of any political party; he took an independent view and was sceptical of communismus as well as of capitalism. He continued to write novels, essays, and political journalist during the 1930s and 1940s.

His most famous books are the political allegories of Stalinism - Animal Farm (1945) and the anti-utopian Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949). Animal farm is a modern fable. Orwell satirises the events of the Russian revolution and the subsequent rise to power of the communist dictatorship. The farm represents the land that was a symbol of Soviet Union. Farmer Jones (the czar) frankly exploits the farm animals (the people), because he has always done so and he feels that he is right. When animals are driven to revolt, they are led by the intelligent pigs. The plot parallels historical events: the idealistic revolution, the establishment of secret police (the dogs), forced civilisation of the farm and the exploration of the workers, as represented by the horse Boxer. The leader-pig Napoleon has become more like the old farmer, even walking on his hind legs, while the enslaved animals live in despair. The revolutionary doctrine that "All animals are equal" has been corrupted to "Some animals are more equal than others".

Nineteen-Eighty-Four describes England under a dictatorship of mechanised bureaucracy. It is a story of Winston Smith, the men who unsatisfied with the system, but he has no chance and finally is his personality absolutely destroyed. He shows totality as it really is, with all of its atrocities and nonsense.
He died from tuberculose in 1950.