Abstract

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair, the son of Richard Walmesley Blair and Ida (Limouzin) Blair. Orwell was born in India and lived there for four years, until his father moved the family back to England, to a small house named Nutshell, located in Henley-on-Thames. After a short leave, Orwell's father returned alone to India; his wife and children remained in England, where he rejoined them later, upon his retirement. With his father's return, Orwell, like most male members of the upper middle class, was sent away to boarding school, St. Cyprian's, located at Eastbourne on the Sussex coast. In this paper, we try to focus on the George Orwell. The paper will discuss about the history of the time and how the author's life influenced his chosen novel (1984).

George Orwell

Introduction

After several miserable years, as Orwell describes them in his autobiographical Such, Such Were the Joys (1953), he won a scholarship to Eton, the public school that would forever set him apart from the working classes about which he was so concerned during most of his adult life. Considered rather unacademic at Eton, Orwell graduated in December, 1921, and, after a decision not to attend university, he applied to the India Office for the position of imperial police officer. Five years in Burma, from 1922 to 1927, shaped the impressionable young man so as to make him forever sympathetic to individuals victimized by governmental bureaucracy and imperialistic power. Orwell left Burma in the summer of 1927; ostensibly on sick leave (he suffered from a lung condition most of his life). At some point early in his leave, Orwell wrote a letter of resignation to the India Office and explained to his skeptical parents that all he really wanted to do was to write. (Bloom, 13)

Background

In 1928, Orwell commenced a long, five-year apprenticeship as a writer, time spent as a tramp in both Paris and London and in the writing and rewriting of countless manuscripts. By 1933 he had assumed the name by which he is known and had produced, in addition to at least two destroyed novels, the nonfictional Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and his first novel, Burmese Days, published one year later.

From 1933 to 1937, Orwell continued to develop his literary talents, producing two more novels, a nonfiction book about his experiences with poverty-stricken coal miners in Wigan (The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937), and several essays, occasional pieces, and book reviews. By the end of this period, he had also married for the first time and, within a year or so of that, gone to Spain. In perhaps the most singular experience of his life to date, the Spanish Civil War found Orwell on the front lines, a member of a Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (a Marxist worker's party) brigade; from that time on, Orwell passionately declared himself a fighter for “democratic Socialism.” In that context, he wrote his most famous nonfictional work, Homage to Catalonia (1938). After being wounded (and nearly imprisoned), ...