George Orwell

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25th, 1903 in Motihari, India and was educated in England at Eton College.

Orwell's father, Richard worked for the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service and his mother grew up in Burma due to her own father's business ventures.

When Orwell was just a year old, his mother brought two of her children back home to England and settled in Oxfordshire. Orwell was brought up by his mother and did not see his father again until the age of nine. While in secondary school, Orwell began writing and wrote two poems that were published in the local paper.

After school, however, Orwell decided to join the Imperial Police (the Indian Police Service) and he moved to Burma and served with the police there from 1922 to 1927. After which he returned to England and decided to follow his dream of becoming a writer.

For many years he struggled to get published and lived in poverty and poor health in England and Paris. Out of this experience came his first book, ‘Down And Out in Paris and London', a memoir which was published in 1933.

Around this time, Orwell began a teaching career at a small school in Hayes, West London but shortly became disillusioned with the job and began working for a bookseller in Hampstead, London.

In 1935, Orwell met his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy at a party thrown by his landlady and the two married a year later on June 9th, 1936.

Orwell's second non-fiction work, "Burmese Days" about the sordid conditions of the homeless in Burma was published in 1935 and Eric Arthur Blair officially changed his name to George Orwell.

In 1936, Orwell investigated the social divisions in the then severely economically depressed north of England and wrote what became his third book, "The Road To Wigan Pier" which was published later that year.

Also that year, Orwell joined the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. The description of his experiences, in "Homage to Catalonia" (1938) forms one of the most moving accounts of this war ever written.

After his time in the war, Orwell's political convictions underwent a profound change. His condemnation of totalitarian society is expressed in the brilliantly witty allegorical fable, "Animal Farm" which was published in 1945.

That year, Orwell's wife Eileen underwent a hysterectomy complication and passed away at her sister-in-law's country home in County Durham. After his wife's untimely death, Orwell began writing more and published 130 articles and essays.

It was during this time that he wrote his most critically acclaimed and famous novel, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949).

Orwell remarried in 1949 to Sonia Brownell who nursed him in the final months of his life. Orwell began experiencing trouble with his lungs and he passed away suddenly on January 21st, 1950.

According to his wishes, Orwell was buried in the graveyard of the closest church to where he died in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire where his grave is still standing today.