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There are two George Orwells. The one who became posthumously famous for producing the speculative works Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, giving the adjective "Orwellian" to totalitarian societies. And the George Orwell who wrote gritty accounts of real life in journalism and fiction for most of his life. These earlier works were little-known by the public during his lifetime but have since become influential works of literature and political thought since his death. Orwell's life was full of other seeming paradoxes. Born Eric Arthur Blair in India to members of the Indian Civil Service, he was educated at Eton in Britain. He served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927 before leaving to live in England and France in self-imposed poverty. His first book, Down and and Out in Paris and London (1933), is an engrossing account of his experience living among tramps, while his first novel Burmese Days (1934) hearkened back to his earlier life as a policeman. As a socialist, he joined the republican forces in the Spanish Civil War where he was wounded in 1936 but his autobiographical account of this conflict, Homage to Catalonia (1938), criticized the communists. He became identified more as an anarchist—opposing rule by any one party. His next non-fictional book, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), continued his story of impoverished life in Britain in a sympathetic study of the lives of miners in the Lancashire town of Wigan. Three more novels published in the 1930s include A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939). He also produced much journalism in the last two decades of his short life, one of the most influential articles being the essay "Politics and the English Language" (1950) which associates authoritarianism with linguistic decay. The pieces have been collected in Dickens, Dali and Others (1946), Shooting an Elephant (1950) and the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell (1968). But his most popular works were published in his last few years. Animal Farm (1945) is a fable in which animals take over a farm and establish a regime that turns from egalitarianism to oligarchy—considered a satire on Stalinism. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is one of the best-known novels of the twentieth century, as even people who have never read it know that it warns of a centralized society run by Big Brother. In the anti-communist 1950s these works were heralded as attacks on socialism, but before he died Orwell denied this:
(Quoted from the
four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters Twenty volumes of his Complete Works were published in 1998. — Eric |
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© Copyright 2003 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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ORWELL, George