George
Orwell, who passed
away on 21 January 1950, in London, is one of the
world’s most influential writers, the visionary author of Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty-four and eyewitness, non-fiction classics Down and Out in Paris in London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.
George Orwell was born
Eric Blair in India in 1903 into a comfortable ‘lower-upper-middle class’
family. Orwell’s father had served the British Empire, and Orwell’s own first
job was as a policeman in Burma. Orwell wrote in “Shooting an
Elephant” (1936) that his time in the police force had shown him the “dirty
work of Empire at close quarters”; the experience made him a lifelong foe of
imperialism.
By the
time of his death in 1950, he was world-renowned as a journalist and author:
for his eyewitness reporting on war (shot in the neck in Spain) and
poverty (tramping in London, washing dishes in Paris or visiting pits
and the poor in Wigan); for his political and cultural commentary, where he
stood up to power and said the unsayable (‘if liberty means anything at
all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’); and for
his fiction, including two of the most popular novels ever written:
Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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