Orwell, George (redirected from Eric Blair)

Orwell, George, pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair, 1903–50, British novelist and essayist, b. Bengal, India. He is best remembered for his scathingly satirical and frighteningly political novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. After attending Eton, he served (1922–27) with the Indian imperial police in Burma (now Myanmar). He returned to Europe in 1927, living penuriously in Paris and later in London. In 1936 he fought with the Republicans in the Spanish civil war and was seriously wounded. His writings—particularly such early works as Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Burmese Days (1934), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Homage to Catalonia (1938)—are highly autobiographical.

A socialist, Orwell was a keen critic of imperialism, fascism, Stalinism, and capitalism. His works are concerned with the sociopolitical conditions of his time, notably with the problem of human freedom. Animal Farm (1946) is a witty, satirical fable about the failure of Soviet-style Communism, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a prophetic novel describing the dehumanization of humanity in a mechanistic, totalitarian world. Orwell's other novels include A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1940). The master of a superbly lucid prose style, Orwell wrote many literary essays, which some critics find superior to his novels. His volumes of essays include Dickens, Dali and Others (1946), Shooting an Elephant (1950), and the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (4 vol., 1968, repr. 2000).

Bibliography

See biographies by B. Crick (1980), M. Shelden (1991), J. Meyers (2000), G. Bowker (2003), and D. J. Taylor (2003); studies by J. Meyers, ed. (1975), R. Williams (1981), L. Hunter (1984), A. Coppard and B. Crick, ed. (1985), R. Alok (1989), J. Rodden (1989, repr. 2002), and C. Hitchens (2002).

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Orwell, George

 orig. Eric Arthur Blair

George Orwell.

(credit: BBC Copyright)

(born 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India—died Jan. 21, 1950, London, Eng.) British novelist, essayist, and critic. Instead of accepting a scholarship to a university, Orwell went to Burma to serve in the Indian Imperial Police (1922–27), an experience that changed him into a literary and political rebel. On returning to Europe, he lived in self-imposed poverty, gaining material for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), and became a socialist. He went to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War and stayed to join the Republican militia. His war experiences, which gave him a lifelong dread of communism (he would later provide British intelligence services with lists of his fellow British communists), are recounted in Homage to Catalonia (1938). His novels typically portray a sensitive, conscientious, emotionally isolated individual at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. His most famous works are the anti-Soviet satirical fable Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a dystopic vision of totalitarianism whose influence was widely felt in the postwar decades. His literary essays are also admired.

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Orwell, George 

(pen name of Eric Blair). Born June 25, 1903, at Motihari in Bengal, India; died Jan. 21, 1950, in London. English writer and publicist.

The son of a British colonial official, Orwell graduated from Eton College in 1921. After serving with the British police in Burma, he returned to Europe in 1927. For several years he lived in poverty in London and Paris and established close ties with petit bourgeois radicals. He fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 in the ranks of the POUM, an anarchist organization. He was seriously wounded and, disillusioned with revolutionary ideals, became a bourgeois liberal reformist and anticommunist. During World War II he served in the English home guard and was a commentator for the BBC and a correspondent for the newspaper the Observer.

As a writer, Orwell was greatly influenced by Jonathan Swift, Samuel Butler, Jack London, D. H. Lawrence, and E. I. Zamiatin. He first gained fame with his writings about the life of British miners in impoverished areas, his reminiscences of the war in Spain, and his literary criticism and publicistic works. However, his literary and political reputation rests almost entirely on his satire Animal Farm (1945), which advocates the pointlessness of revolutionary struggle, and his antiutopian novel 1984 (1949), in which he depicts the society that would replace capitalism and bourgeois democracy. This future society, according to Orwell, is a totalitarian hierarchical structure, based on sophisticated techniques for enslaving the masses physically and psychologically and on total scorn for the freedom and dignity of the individual. It is a society of material deprivation and universal fear and hatred.

From the standpoint of subjective idealism, Orwell examines the problems of freedom and necessity and of the truth value of knowledge. On this basis, he attempts to justify voluntarism in politics. His warnings against certain dangerous social trends and his protests against the suppression of individual freedom are intermixed with homilies on the uselessness of struggling for a better future. This attitude enabled the ideologists of reaction to make use of Orwell’s work to carry on an extensive anticommunist propaganda campaign, utilizing to this end millions of copies of his writings in many different languages and numerous radio and television broadcasts and motion pictures.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s there has been an increased interest in the West in Orwell’s ideological heritage. An intense struggle has been waged over his legacy between reactionary, ultra-right forces and petit bourgeois radicals, who view Orwell as a predecessor of the New Left and believe that many trends in modern Western society are epitomized in the Orwellian vision of 1984.

WORKS

Down and Out in Paris and London. London, 1933.
Burmese Days. New York, 1934.
The Road to Wigan Pier. London, 1937.
Homage to Catalonia. London, 1938.
Coming Up for Air. London, 1939.
Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters. Edited by S. Orwell and I. Angus. Vols. 1–4. New York, 1968.

REFERENCES

Morton, L. A. Angliiskaia utopiia. Moscow, 1956. Chapter 7. (Translated from English.)
Semenov, lu. N. Obshchestvennyi progress i sotsial’naia filosofiia sovremennoi burzhuazii. Moscow, 1965. Chapter 2, sec. 2.
Rees, R. George Orwell: Fugitive From the Camp of Victory. Carbondale, Ill., 1962.
The Works of George Orwell. Edited by M. Gross. New York, 1971.

E. A. ARAB-OGLY