George Orwell: About his life
Being an essayist, novelist, and critic, George Orwell was best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was a man with strong convictions who addressed some of his time’s biggest political movements, including nationalism, populism, and communism. George Orwell was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, India, as Eric Arthur Blair. Orwell, the son of a British civil servant, spent his first days in India where his father had been serving. About a year after his birth, his mother brought him and his older sister to England and settled in Henley-on-Thames. His father stayed behind. Orwell didn’t get acquainted with his father until he retired from services in 1912. And even after that, the duo never developed a close bond. He considered his father obtuse and conservative.
Orwell took up an early composition, supposedly creating his first poem around the age of four. He later wrote that he had the isolated child’s tendency to make up stories and conversing with fictional characters, and he would think literary aspirations were combined with the sense of being alone and underappreciated from the very beginning. One of his first creative achievements emerged when he was 11 years old and he had a poem posted in the daily newspaper. Orwell was sent to the boarding school, as were several other boys in England. He headed to St. Cyprian’s in Eastbourne’s seaside town in 1911, where he got his first experience of England’s class structure. Orwell found at a partial scholarship that the school treated the wealthier kids better than the poorer ones. He was not at all popular with his peers and from his difficult situation, he found solace in books. He was reading plays of Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells, to name a couple. He made up for what he lacked in charisma, in smarts. To continue his studies, Orwell gained scholarships to Eton College and Wellington College.
Orwell found himself in a dead-end when he completed his education at Eton. His father did not have the funds to pay for an education at university. Instead, in 1922 he joined the Colonial Police Force of India. Orwell resigned from his job after five years in Burma and returned to England. He wanted to make it as a novelist. After leaving the Indian Imperial Force, Orwell strained to get his writing career get going and took all kinds of work, including becoming a dishwasher, to meet ends. Orwell’s first significant work addressed his time both in Paris and London, trying to carve out a living. The book offered a frank glimpse into the lives of the poorest in society and others who lead a transient life. The author did publish the book under the pseudonym, i.e., George Orwell, not wanting to disgrace his family.
First, Orwell described his overseas observations during Burmese Days, which gave a grim look at the colonial rule in Burma, then more of the Indian empire of the British legacy. Since this novel was released, Orwell’s interest in political affairs expanded rapidly. Orwell moved to Spain in December 1936, where he supported one of the Spanish Civil War parties that were fighting against General Franco. In his time with a militia, Orwell was seriously wounded, being shot in the throat and neck. He’d been unable to speak for many weeks. Orwell has been arrested in Spain with his partner, Eileen, on charges of treason. Thankfully, when the charges were filed after the couple left the country. Not long after his return to England, the prolific writer was afflicted with many health issues. Orwell had sickness cycles for years until, in 1938, he was formally diagnosed with tuberculosis.
He spent a few months trying to recover at the Preston Hall Sanatorium, but for the rest of his life, he would continue battling tuberculosis. There was no appropriate cure for the disease at the time it was first diagnosed. Orwell had taken on multiple term papers to support himself. Through the years, he has published countless essays and reviews, establishing a reputation for creating excellently-crafted anthropology. Orwell secured a job as a writer in 1941, with the BBC. In the East part of the British Empire, he produced news commentaries and programs for audiences. Orwell drew literarily admirable like E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, showed up on his services. With World War II going on, Orwell had found himself working as an advocate to promote the national interest of the country. He detested this part of his assignment, portraying the environment of the business in his diary as something midway between a girls’ college and a mental asylum, and everything he was doing then was useless, or marginally worse than nothingness. Orwell quit in 1943, commenting that he wasted his energy and the public funds on doing practices that generated no result.
He thought that the transmission of British imperialism in India was an almost impossible activity in the existing political environment. Orwell was the creative editor of a radical newspaper around that time. Also called a new generation conscience, Orwell is best known for two novels viz., Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Both novels, released towards the end of Orwell’s life, have become movies and over the years, have had enjoyed considerable success.