Eric Arthur Blair (later George Orwell) was born in 1903 in the Indian Village Motihari, which lies
               near the border of Nepal. At that time India was a part of the British Empire, and Blair's father
               Richard ,held a post as an agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Blair's
               paternal grandfather too had been part of the British Raj ,and had served in the Indian Army.
               Eric's mother ,Ida Mabel Blair ,the daughter of a French tradesman, was about eighteen years
               younger than her husband Richard Blair . Eric had a elder sister called Marjorie. The Blairs led a
               relatively privileged and fairly pleasant existence, in helping to administer the Empire. Although
               the Blair family was not very wealthy - Orwell later described them ironically as
               "lower-upper-middle class" . They owned no property, had no extensive investments; they were
               like many middle-class English families of the time, totally dependent on the British Empire for
               their livelihood and prospects. In 1907 when Eric had about eight years ,the family returned to
               England and lived at Henley, though the father continued to work in India until he retired in
               1912. With some difficulty ,Blair's parents sent their son to a private preparatory school in
               Sussex at the age of eight. At the age of thirteen he won a scholarship to Wellington, and soon
               after another to Eaton ,the famous public school.

               His parents had forced him to work hard at a deary preparatory school, and now after winning
               the scholarship, he was not interested any more in further mental exertion unrelated to his
               private ambition. At the beginning of Why I Write, he explains that from the age of five or six he
               had known that he would be- must be-a writer. But in order to become a writer one had to read
               literature. But English literature was not a major subject at Eaton, where most boys came from
               backgrounds either irremediably unliterary or so literary that to teach them 'English Literature'
               would be absurd. One of Eric's tutors later declared that his famous pupil had done absolutely
               no work for five years. This was of course untrue: Eric has apprenticed himself to the masters of
               English prose who most appealed to him - including Swift, Sterne and Jack London.

               However he has finished the final examinations at Eaton as 138th of 167. He neglected to win a
               university scholarship, and in 1922 Eric Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police. In doing so he
               was already breaking away from the path most of his school-fellows would take, for Eaton often
               led to either Oxford or Cambridge. Instead he was drawn to a life of travel and action. He trained
               in Burma, and served there in the police force for five years. In 1927,while home on leave, he
               resigned. There have been at least two reasons for this: firstly ,his life as a policeman was a
               distraction from the life he really wanted, which was to be a writer; and secondly, he had come
               to feel that, as a policeman in Burma, he was supporting a political system in which he could no
               longer believe. Even as early as this his ideas about writing and his political ideas were closely
               linked. It was not simply that he wished to break away from British Imperialism in India: he
               wished to "escape from ... every form of man's dominion over man", as he said in Road to Wigan
               Pier (1937), and the social structure out of which he came dependent ,he saw it, on just that
               "dominion over others" - not just over the Burmese ,but over the English working class.

               Back in London he settled down in a grotty bedroom in Portobello Road. There, at the age of
               twenty-four, he started to teach himself how to write. His neighbours were impressed by the
               determination . Week after week he remained in his unheated bedroom ,thawing his hands over a
               candle when they became too numb to write. In spring of 1928 he turned his back on his own
               inherited values, by taking a drastic step. For more than one year he went on living among the
               poor, first in London, then in Paris. For him the poor were victims of injustice, playing the same
               part as the Burmese played in their country. One reason for going to live among the poor was to
               over come a repulsion which he considered as typical for his own class. In Paris he lived and
               worked in a working-class quarter. At that time, he tells us, Paris was full of artists and would-be
               artists. There Orwell led a life that was far from bohemian ,when he eventually got a job, he
               worked as a dishwasher. Once again his journey was downward into the life to which he felt he
               should expose himself, the life of poverty-stricken ,or of those who barely scarped a living.

               When he came back to London, he lived for a couple of months among the tramps and poor
               people in London. In December 1929 Eric spent Christmas with his family. At his visit he
               announced that he was going to write a book about his time in Paris. The original version of
               Down And Out entiteled A Scullion's Diary was completed in October 1930 and came to only
               35,000 words for Orwell had used only a part of his material. After two rejections from publishers
               Orwell wrote Burmese Days (published in 1934), a book based on his experiences in the colonial
               service.

               We owe the rescue of Down and Out to Mabel Firez: She was asked to destroy the script, but
               save the paper clips. Instead she took the manuscript and brought it to Leonard Monroe, literary
               agent at the house Gollancz, and bullied him to read it. Soon it was accepted - on condition that
               all swearwords were deleted and certain names changed. Having completed this last revision
               Eric wrote to Victor Gollancz:'...I would prefer the book to be published pseudonymously. I have
               no reputation that is lost by doing this and if the book has any kind of success I can always use
               this pseudonym again.' But Orwell's reasons for taking the name Orwell are much more
               complicated than those writers usually have when adopting a pen-name. In effect it meant that
               Eric Blair would somehow have to shed his old identity and take on a new. This is exactly what
               he tried to do: he tried to change himself from Eric Blair, old Etonian and English colonial
               policemen, into George Orwell, classless antiauthoritarian.

               Down And Out In Paris And London, is not a novel; it is a kind of documentary account of life
               unknown to most of its readers. And this was the point of it: he wished to bring the English
               middle class, of which he was a member, to an understanding of what life they led and enjoyed,
               was founded upon, the life under their very noses. Here we see two typical aspects of Orwell as
               a writer: his idea of himself as the exposer of painful truth, which people for various reasons do
               not wish to look at; and his idea of himself as a representative of the English moral conscience
               .(Winston Smith - 1984 - last representative of moral ).

               His next book was A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936). In
               1936 he opened a village shop in Wallington, Hertfordshire where he did business in the
               mornings, and wrote in the afternoons. The same year he married Elieen O 'Shaughnessy and
               also , received a commission from the Left Book Club to examine the conditions of the poor and
               unemployed. This resulted in The Road to Wigan Pier. He went on living among the poor about
               who he was to write his book. Once again it was a journey away from the comparative comfort of
               the middle class life. His account of mining communities in the north of England in this book is
               full of detail, and conveys to the reader what it was like to go down a mine. When the Left Book
               Club read what he had written about the English class system and English socialism in the The
               Road to Wigan Pier they were not pleased , and when the book was published it contained a
               preface by Victor Gollancz taking issue with many of Orwell's main points. The Left Book Club
               wasn't pleased because in the second half of the book Orwell criticised the English socialism, for
               in his eyes it was mostly unrealistic, and another fact criticised by Orwell was that most of the
               socialists tended to be members of the Middle class. The kind of socialist Orwell makes fun of is
               the sort who spouts phrases like "proletarian solidarity" , and who puts of decent people, the
               people for who Orwell wants to write.

               Having completed The Road to Wigan Pier he went to Spain at the end of 1936, with the idea of
               writing newspaper articles on the Civil War which had broken out there. The conflict in Spain
               was between the communist, socialist Republic, and General Franco's Fascist military rebellion.
               When Orwell arrived in Barcelona he was astonished about the atmosphere he found there:
               what had seemed impossible in England seemed a fact of daily life in Spain. Class distinction
               seemed to have vanished. There was a shortage of everything, but there was equality. Orwell
               joined in the struggle, by enlisting in the militia of POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación de
               Marxista), which was associated with the British Labour Party For the first time in his life
               socialism seemed reality, something for which it was worth fighting for. Orwell recvieved a basic
               military training, and was send to the front in Aragon, near Zaragoza. He spent a couple of dull
               months there, and he was wounded in the throat. Three and a half month later when he returned
               to Barcelona ,he found it a changed city. No longer a place where the socialist word comrade
               was really felt to mean something, it was a city returning to "normal". Even worse, he was to find
               that the group he was with, the POUM, was now accused of being a Fascist militia ,secretly
               helping Franco. Orwell had to sleep in the open to avoid showing his papers, and eventually
               managed to escape into France with his wife. His account of his time in Spain was published in
               Homage to Catalonia (1938). His experiences in Spain left two impressions on Orwell's mind:
               firstly, they showed him that socialism in action was a human possibility, if only a temporary
               one. He never forgot the exhilaration of those first days in Barcelona , when a new society
               seemed possible, where "comradeship" instead of being just a socialist abuse of language, was
               reality. But secondly he saw, the experience of the city returning to normal as a gloomy
               confirmation of the fact that there will always be different classes, that there is something in the
               human nature that seeks violence, conflict, power over others. It is clear that these two
               impressions, of hope on the one hand, and despair on the other are entirely contradictionary.
               Nevertheless, despite the despair and confusion of his return to Barcelona (there were street
               fights between different groups of socialists). Orwell left Spain with a hopeful impression.

               In 1938 Orwell became ill with tuberculosis, and spent the winter in Morocco. While being there,
               he wrote his next book, a novel entitled Coming up for Air, published in1939, the year the long
               threatened war between England and Germany broke out. Orwell wanted to fight, as he has done
               in Spain, against the fascist enemy, but he was declared unfit. In 1941 he joined the British
               Broadcasting Corporation as talks producer in the Indian section of the eastern service. He
               served in the Home Guard, a wartime civilian body for local defence. In 1943 he left the BBC to
               become literary editor of the tribune, and began writing Animal Farm. In 1944 the Orwells
               adopted a son, but in 1945 his wife died during an operation. Towards the end of war Orwell
               went to Europe as a reporter. Late in 1945 he went to the island of Jura off the Scottish coast,
               and settled there in 1946. He wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four there. The islands climate was
               unsuitable for someone suffering from tuberculosis and Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the
               bleakness of human suffering, the indignity of pain. Indeed he said that the book wouldn't have
               been so gloomy had he not been so ill. Later that year he married Sonia Bronwell. He died in
               January 1950.
 

               "The 1995 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia"