Eric Arthur Blair, known as George Orwell, was born on 25 June 1903 in the Indian Punjab province to a middle class family. His father was a junior staffer of the British Civil Administration’s Opium Department. His mother was the daughter of a French timber merchant in Burma who came from a family that Orwell said had the ethics of the bourgeoisie but not the money.
In his novel ‘Animal Farm’, Orwell depicted the Bolshevik Revolution and how it ended up in Stalin’s authoritarianism. And in his futuristic novel ‘1984’, he depicted how authoritarian regimes of communism, Nazism and fascism control people’s lives.
In 1917, Orwell entered the famous Eaton School in England that only the children of the rich families went to. But he was accepted for his intelligence and excellence.
In 1922, rather than to pursue graduate studies at the University of Oxford or Cambridge as all students did, he joined the Imperial police and worked as a policeman in Burma for five years. Then he went back to England, where he decided to become a novelist.
Because he lived like a bohemian in London, he decided to go to Paris to wash dishes in a restaurant. He wrote his first article about the censorship in England at that time.
In 1933, he returned to England and published his first book about his memories of London and Paris. Again, he lived like a bohemian and picked up small jobs in the countryside.
In 1934, he worked as a teacher and chose the pseudonym of George Orwell. And when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he joined a Marxist resistance group against General Franco, but later went back to England.
In 1939, he published his book ‘Homage to Catalonia’, then traveled to Morocco and stayed six months in Marrakech. Then he went back to England and stood against those who wanted to surrender to Hitler. He tried to enroll in the British army to fight Nazism, but his application was rejected because of his illness.
His book ‘1984’ was published in 1948 to become one of the classics of world literature. Perhaps the uniqueness of his novels stemmed from his personal experience.
He died on 21 January 1950 at the age of 47, leaving nine important books and 700 articles that he wrote over 16 years.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
