Essay On George Orwell Biography

Although George Orwell was a great writer from the beginning, he didn’t become famous until very late in his short life. His writing was very clear and precise. He mainly wrote autobiographical accounts but his last two novels were bitter accounts of political beliefs. His last two novels became so popular that he became a renowned writer all over the world. He was born in 1903 to a low-classed, British family in Motihari, Bengal, India and was christened was Eric Arthur Blair. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair was a customs officer in the opium department of Indian Civil Service. When he was merely four years old, his family moved back to England and lived in a small village called Henley which was a short distance from London. His father left Orwell and others in Henley and went back to India to serve in the Indian Civil Service. Our Service Can Write a Custom Essay on George Orwell for You!

When Orwell turned eight, he entered into a private preparatory school in Sussex. After attending the school in Sussex, he obtained a scholarship and attended two different schools: one in Wellington for a term and another in Eton for four and half years. Later on in his life Orwell claimed that his experience in the preparatory school shaped his views on the English class system. Eton College was based in an area where upper-class people resided. The consciousness of being poor boy living in an upper-class society where the poor were detested helped to make him a radical in his youth. In 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police. His training took place in Burma and he served there for about five years in total. This five year period decisively transformed his mental life. He gradually stated to despise his role as a representative of an alien government and to identify himself with the subject race.

In 1927, he went back to England on leave and there he decided not to go back and serve as a police in Burma. His resignation became effective from January 1st 1928. His dream since childhood was to become a writer and he regarded his profession as a policeman “unsuitable”. However it was understood later that he began to understand imperialism which he abhorred. Thus he left his job as a policeman and started his life as a writer. The name by which the world knows him now and knew him them, George Orwell, was a pseudonym which was suggested by his publisher when he published his first novel. The crises in Orwell’s life were the topic of his writings. His essays and his novels were mainly autobiographical and portrayed his political feelings. The first incident in his life occurred when he was sent in 1936 by the Left Book Club to study the unemployed were living in the working-class districts of Northern England.

He observed the people in Northern England in a miserable state and was tempted to write a novel called “The Road to Wigan Pier” despite the disapproval of his sponsors because he criticized the orthodox English socialism. This trip had a tremendous long term effect on Orwell’s interests; he became interested in the popular culture, which is reflected in his classic essays such as “The Art of Donald McGill”. The second but the most important crisis in Orwell’s life was a visit to Spain as a journalist. As Orwell arrived at Barcelona, he joined the militia unit of a Marxists workers party, the POUM. While serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts, he got severely wounded. In May 1937 he was involved in a fight in which the POUM and the Anarchists were on one side and the Communists were on the other. Eventually, the Communist secret police chased him out of Spain.

Spain revealed to him how far political motives, wrongly applied can destroy the respect for truth prized by the liberal nineteenth century. His experience in the Spanish Civil War and the fights in trenches were told in his novel “Homage to Catalonia”. This novel also exposed the Stalinist bid for power in Spain. Later in his life Orwell wrote the novel “Animal Farm” which showed how much he abhorred Stalin and his communist views. Orwell was an essayist, journalist, and a novelist with a unique combination of a middle-class intellectual and a working-class reformer. A strong autobiographical element runs through most of Orwell’s writing giving both his novels and essays a sense of immediacy and conviction. He wrote with remarkable clarity and his credo was that fine prose should be transparent ‘like a window pane’. Orwell felt that the age was threatened by totalitarianism. Therefore, he wrote for libertarian socialism and against totalitarianism.