George Orwell
English · 1903–1950 · Novelist, essayist, and journalist
Portrait: Cassowary Colorizations, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
An English novelist and essayist, born Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and built his essays out of work he had done himself.
Why read George Orwell?
Orwell wrote plainly on purpose, and he argued that sloppy language and bad politics feed each other. Shooting an Elephant puts a young colonial policeman in front of a crowd that expects him to kill, and watches him do it against his own judgment. Politics and the English Language takes apart stale, ready-made phrasing and ends with six rules for writing. StoryBites publishes analysis of both essays rather than their text, because they are still under copyright in the United States.
A life in six dates
- 1903Born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, in British India
- 1922Joins the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, where he serves until 1927
- 1936Shooting an Elephant appears in the magazine New Writing, and he leaves for Spain in December
- 1937Wounded in the throat while fighting in the Spanish Civil War
- 1945Publishes Animal Farm
- 1946Publishes Politics and the English Language in the magazine Horizon
- 1950Dies of tuberculosis in London, the year after Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared