English novelist, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair. George Orwell was born in India, where his father was a minor British officer in the Indian civil service. He studied at Eton from 1917 to 1921, and returned to Burma in 1922 as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. During the years, though, he grew more uncomfortable with the imperial rule and in 1928 he decided to resign from the police and to return to London.
During the 1930s, Orwell embraced socialism. In 1933 he published Down and Out in Paris and London, a recount of his experiences in the slums of the two cities. His first novel, Burmese Days (1934), initiates his career as a fictional writer at odds with the contemporary social and political environment, and , in particular, with imperialism.
His first socialist book was the political treatise The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)- a description of the unemployed miners of Northern England.
Orwell was also an established journalist. He reported the Spanish civil war from Spain - where he was also permanently injured at his throat - and headed the Indian service of the BBC during World War II.
In 1945 appeared Animal Farm, a novel based on the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Stalin. It tells the story of a group of animals, the pigs, who, with the excuse of setting up an egalitarian society, overthrow their human masters only to set up their own dictatorial society.
The success of Animal Farm was somehow overshadowed by Orwell's next novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).
Set in an imaginary future, Nineteen Eighty-four is a radical attack against any form of totalitarianism, such as Nazism and Stalinism. Winston Smith is an English man working for the party, but intended to fight secretly against it. When discovered, though, he is imprisoned, tortured and brainwashed and then forced to love the party's leader, the Big Brother.
George Orwell died of tubercolosis in 1950, in London. Among his other novels are A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). He also wrote several essays, among which Shooting an Elephant (1936), The Lion and the King (1941), Notes on Nationalism (1945).