George Orwell, Author of 1984 April 2
George Orwell Author of 1984 - The High School English Literature Curriculum
Who was George Orwell, the author of 1984?
George Orwell’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair.
He was born in Bengal, India in 1903. His father was an opium agent and worked for the Indian Civil Service. When he was four years old, his family returned to England. He attended the Anglican national school at Henley and later St Cyprian’s school in Sussex. Possibly due to the strict regime of these schools, he wrote some anti-authoritarian works including ‘Awake! Young Men of England’.
When he was fourteen, he won a scholarship to Eton College and made a name for himself as a contributor to many college publications. One of his teachers at Eton was the famous author Aldous Huxley (Brave New World).
At the age of nineteen, he joined the Burmese police and spent five years there. Although he enjoyed his time in Burma, he became disillusioned with the cloak of Imperialism and this may also have inspired his anti authoritarian views later expressed. On his return from Burma he moved to Paris and started to write short stories but success eluded him. Most of his work was rejected by the publishers.
He contracted pneumonia in 1928, an illness which weakened him considerably. After recovering, he returned to England in 1929, when he was twenty-six, and lived on the bread line for a couple of years as he wanted to experience the tough living conditions of the under privileged. To protect his family’s reputation, he adopted the penname George Orwell.
Subsequently he got a job as a sales assistant in a bookshop in London while continuing to write in his spare time. He married in 1936 and he and his wife went to Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to fight against General Franco’s Nationalist party. He sustained a neck wound during the war. After the war, both he and his wife joined a Marxist party in Barcelona and were fortunate not to have been arrested or worse.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte April 1
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - 5 things you should know.