On this date in 1903, George Orwell (née Eric Arthur Blair) was born in India. Educated at Eton College, Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma as a young man, later writing a novel, Burmese Days (1934), about it. Bumming around Europe for the experience, Blair wrote an autobiographical account, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Teaching for income, he continued to write novels, including A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), with its unflattering look at the repression of religion, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939). He also wrote a sympathetic nonfiction account of miners, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). His book, Homage to Catalonia (1938), was written after he was wounded by Francoists while fighting for Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. When Stalinists came after Blair and his anarchist friends, his views on communism changed. While he supported a mild socialism, his masterpiece, Animal Farm (1945), skewered Stalinism: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." Religion was satirized by the character "Moses," a bird, who was a "spy and a tale-bearer," who talked up "Sugarcandy Mountain, to which all animals went when they died." Blair did commentary for the BBC during WWII. His second masterpiece, the cautionary tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), unforgettably put "newspeak" and "Big Brother" into the political lexicon, and conjured up a terrifying image of totalitarianism. Blair died of tuberculosis. In 1968, the 4-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell was published. D. 1950.
“One must choose between God and Man, and all 'radicals' and 'progressives,' from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.”
—Reflections on Gandhi, p. 232, Orwell Reader, edited by Richard H. Rovere
Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor
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