GEORGE ORWELL
June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950

"One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good writing is like a windowpane."

~ He was the second child of a civil servant in the opium department and the daughter of a tea-merchant in Burma.

~ In 1904 Orwell moved with his mother and sister to England.

~ His mother wanted him to have a public school education, but they couldn't afford the fees, making it necessary for him to obtain a scholarship. 

~ His first writings were published in college periodicals. During these years Orwell developed his antipathy towards the English class systems.

~ Also Orwell's years at St Cyprian's Preparatory School in Easbourne were not happy. His bitter, barely disguised attack on St. Cyprian's, "Such, Such Were The Joys," was not published until 1968 for fear of libel action.

~ After a term at Wellington College, Blair transferred to Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar.

~ His grades were not good.

~ It was decided that he should join the Indian Imperial Police. To do this, he had to pass an entrance exam. Despite fears from his family, Blair passed it, coming seventh out of twenty-seven.

~ He resigned in 1927 and decided to become a writer. In 1928 he moved to Paris where lack of success as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs like dishwashing in a fashionable hotel on the rue de Rivoli.

~ He fell seriously ill in March 1929 and shortly afterwards had all his money stolen from the lodging house.

~ He described his experiences in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933. He assumed the name George Orwell shortly before its publication.

~ In December 1929, Orwell returned to England and went directly to his parents' house in Southwold, which was to remain his base for the next five years.

~ His sister Avril was running a tea house in the town.

~ He became acquainted with many local people including a local gym teacher, Brenda Salkield. Although she rejected his offer of marriage, she remained a friend and regular correspondent for many years.

~ In 1936 Orwell married Eileen O'Shaugnessy, a doctor's daughter.

~ Late in 1936, Orwell traveled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters.

~ That experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist.

~ In 1945, Orwell's Animal Farm was published. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell rich.

~ Orwell and his wife adopted a baby boy, Richard Horatio Blair, in May 1944.

~ Orwell was taken ill again in Cologne in 1945.

~ While he was sick there, his wife died in Newcastle during an operation to remove a tumor. She hadn't told him about the operation because she thought she'd make a speedy recovery, and he needn't worry.

~ For the next four years Orwell mixed journalistic work — mainly for the Tribune, the Observer and the Manchester Evening News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines — with writing his best-known work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949.

~ Originally, Orwell was undecided between titling the book The Last Man in Europe and Nineteen Eighty-Four. His  publisher helped him choose.

~ The title was not the year Orwell had initially intended. He first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness), that was changed to 1982 and then to 1984.

~ Nineteen Eighty-Four was set in an imaginary totalitarian future, and made a deep impression with such phrases as "Big Brother is watching you."

~ Orwell's health was deteriorating. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life.

~ In October 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonai Brownell.

~ Orwell died in London from tuberculosis, at the age of 46.

~ Despite his atheism, Orwell requested to be buried in accordance with the Anglican rite.

~ He was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: "Here lies Eric Arthur Blair."