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Born Eric Blair in India on June 25, 1903, George Orwell was educated as a scholarship student at prestigious boarding schools in England. Because of his background—he famously described his family as “lower-upper-middle class”—he never quite fit in, and felt oppressed and outraged by the dictatorial control that the schools he attended exercised over their students’ lives. After graduating from Eton, Orwell decided to forego college in order to work as a British Imperial Policeman in Burma. He hated his duties in Burma, where he was required to enforce the strict laws of a political regime he despised. His failing health, which troubled him throughout his life, caused him to return to England on convalescent leave. Once back in England, he quit the Imperial Police and dedicated himself to becoming a writer.
Inspired by Jack London’s 1903 book
In 1936, he traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, where he witnessed firsthand the nightmarish atrocities committed by fascist political regimes. The rise to power of dictators such as Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union inspired Orwell’s mounting hatred of totalitarianism and political authority. Orwell devoted his energy to writing novels that were politically charged, first with
Read more about the influence of George Orwell’s politics on his writing in Animal Farm.
In 1949, at the dawn of the nuclear age and before the television had become a fixture in the family home, Orwell’s vision of a post-atomic dictatorship in which every individual would be monitored ceaselessly by means of the telescreen seemed terrifyingly possible. That Orwell postulated such a society a mere thirty-five years into the future compounded this fear. Of course, the world that Orwell envisioned in the novel 1984 did not materialize by the year 1984. That year found authoritarian regime in the Soviet Union beset with domestic and foreign struggles and just a few years from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the authoritative political apparatus that had cruelly ruled the millions of people living within the Soviet sphere of influence. Yet 1984 remains an important novel as the threats of totalitarianism persist–in part for the alarm Orwell sounds against the abusive nature of authoritarian governments, but even more so for his penetrating analysis of the psychology of power and the ways that manipulations of language and history can be used as mechanisms of control.
Orwell had been in declining health for several years by the time 1984 was written and published. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis late in 1947. Nevertheless, he was able to write his enduring novel, which was published to immediate acclaim in June 1949. In October of 1949, Orwell married Sonia Brownell while he was confined to a hospital. His health continued to worsen after his marriage, and he died on January 21, 1950 at the age of 46.
