Biography of George Orwell (1903-1950)

[pic]George Orwell

George Orwell is the pen name (the name taken by an artist) of Eric Arthur Blair: essayist, novelist, literary critic, advocate (lawyer) and fighter for political change. Blair was born on June 25, 1903, in India, which was a British territory. He was the son of Richard Walmesley Blair, a civil servant (a person who works in the cicil service), and Ida Mabel Blair. He moved to England with his mother and sisters at the age of one. He shew academic talent from a young age, so his mother made sure he entered the well-known boarding school called St. Cyprian’s on a scholarship.
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Blair excelled academically there but faced many hardships in its puritanical environment. In the autobiographical essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Orwell describes the social challenges he endured as a scholarship student among England’s wealthy elite.)

Then he entered Eton, a renowned secondary school and was graduated in 1921. Despite his intelligence, he could not afford (to be able to buy something) to attend college. In 1922, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and despised what he saw. Moreover, he could not stand the fact that his job put him directly in the position of privileged oppressor. He resigned from the Indian Imperial Police five years later while going back to England.

Blair/Orwell thus became devoted to the problems of class and government power.

He started to publish essays in 1929 and he took a job as a teacher at Frays College. He also became a literary agent. Blair/Orwell published Down and Out in Paris in 1932. Before the book’s publication, Blair assumed (to pretend to have a diferent name) the pen name “George Orwell” by which he would become famous.

In 1934, he quit his teaching job and moved to Hempstead, an epicenter for young writers at the time, where he worked in a used-book store. He married Eileen O’Shaughnessy a few years later. He published in 1936 The Road to