1984 - George Orwell

LIFE GEORGE ORWELL - “1984” LIFE Blair was born on June 25, 1903 in Motihari, Bengal (modern Bihar), in India. His mother, brought him to the United Kingdom at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when this visited England for three months before leaving again. After Blair finished his studies, his family could not pay for university and he had no prospect of winning a scholarship, so in 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He came to hate imperialism, and when he returned to England on leave in 1927 he decided to resign and become a writer. He later used his Burmese experiences for the novel “Burmese Days” (1934) and in such essays as “A Hanging” (1931), and “Shooting an Elephant” (1936).In 1928, he moved to Paris, where his aunt lived, hoping to make a living as a freelance writer. Then he came back to England in 1929, using his parents' house in Southwold, Suffolk, as a base. Writing what became “Burmese Days”, he made frequent forays into tramping as part of what had by now become a book project on the life of the underclass. Meanwhile, he became a regular contributor to John Middleton Murry's New Adelphi magazine. Blair completed “Down and Out” in 1932, and it was published early the next year while he was working briefly as a schoolteacher at a private school in Hayes, Middlesex. Blair adopted the pen-name George Orwell just before “Down and Out” was published. In December 1936, Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco's Nationalist uprising. Although he travelled alone to Spain, he became part of the Independent Labour Party contingent, a group of some 25 Britons who joined the militia of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), a revolutionary socialist party with which the ILP was allied. The POUM, along with the radical wing of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (the dominant force on the left in Catalonia), believed that Franco could be defeated only if the working class in the Republic overthrew capitalism — a position fundamentally at odds with that of the Spanish Communist Party and its allies, which (backed by Soviet arms and aid) argued for a coalition with bourgeois parties to defeat the Nationalists. In the months after July 1936 there was a profound social revolution in Catalonia, Aragon and other areas where the CNT was particularly strong. By his own admission, Orwell joined the POUM rather than the communist-run International Brigades by chance — but his experiences, in particular his narrow escape from the communist suppression of the POUM in June 1937, made him sympathetic towards the POUM and turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist. In 1949, Orwell wrote “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Originally, Orwell titled the book “The Last Man in Europe”, but his publisher, Frederic Warburg, suggested the change. &ldq Continua »