George Orwell
1903-1950
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. He took the pseudonym George Orwell in the early 30s. An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s he had begun to consider himself a socialist. In 1936, he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in northern England, which resulted in 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. Late in 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist. There is no indication that Orwell ever abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings.
Works
The Road to Wigan Pier, March 1937
Homage to Catalonia, April 1938
Why I join the I.L.P., June 1938
Democracy in the British Army, September 1939
Answers to a Questionnaire on the War, November 1941
Animal Farm, 1945
The Freedom of the Press, 1945
Why I Write, summer 1946
Preface to Kolghosp Tvaryn, March 1947
“Who controls the past controls the future:
Who controls
the present controls the past.”
[Orwell,
1984]
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