Download GEORGE ORWELL Eric Blair used the pen name George Orwell. He

GEORGE ORWELL
Eric Blair used the pen name George Orwell. He was born in India in 1903, son of a colonial
official. He was taken to England by his mother and educated at Eton. Here, he began to develop an
independent-minded personality and professed atheism and socialism. After he left Eton, he joined
the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. He resigned in 1927 and decided to
become a writer. In 1928, he moved to Paris where lack of success as a writer forced him into a
series of menial jobs. Late in 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against
Franco's Nationalists. Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943,
he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine.
Main works: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to Catalonia (1938), Animal Farm (1945),
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Through his works, Orwell desired to reveal the facts and draw conclusions from them. The writing
is a mean to express and a way of interpretation of reality, therefore it provides a useful social
function. Indebted to Dickens in the choice of social theme and the use of realistic factual language,
he warned against the increasing artificiality of urban civilization. Above all he presented a critique
of totalitarianism, warning against the violation of liberty.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
It is an anti-utopian or dystopian novel, which shows a frightening future society in 1984 so distant
from the time it was written 1948. It depicts a totalitarian world: there is no privacy; love and every
emotions are forbidden; the country is in a perpetual state of war; the Party takes the absolute
control over the press and propaganda; language, history and thoughts are controlled, through the
introduction of the Newspeak and the Doublethinking. Any form of rebellion is punished with
prison and torture.
Animal Farm
Animal Farm is an allegorical and dystopian novel published on 17th August 1945. According to the
author, the novel reflects the events leading up to the Russian Revolution in 1917 then into the
Stalin Era in the Soviet Union. He was against the Stalinism, in fact according to him this turned
into a brutal dictatorship, enforced by a regime of terror.