biography
| name: |
Orwell, George
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pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1903–50)
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| biography:
| Novelist and essayist, born in Motihari, Bengal, E India. He was educated at Eton, and served in Burma in the Indian Imperial Police (1922–7), but rejected the political injustice of imperial life (recounted in the novel Burmese Days, 1934) to live a life of poverty in the East End of London and in Paris, which became the subject for his book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Similarly researched experiences led to the writing of A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to Catalonia (1938) and The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) His experience of fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War intensified his political commitment to the Left. During World War 2, he was war correspondent for the BBC and the Observer, and wrote for the Tribune. His intellectual honesty motivated his biting satire of Communist ideology in Animal Farm (1945) - a masterpiece which was equalled by his novel 1984 (1949), a pessimistic satire about the threat of totalitarianism and the mechanistic society of the future. He died of tuberculosis a few months after its publication. |
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