George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair was born in Motihari, British India, in 1903, the son of a minor official in the Indian Civil Service. He was educated at Eton on a scholarship — clever enough to get in, not rich enough to fit — and chose Burma over Oxford, serving for five years as a colonial police officer in the Indian Imperial Police. The experience left him with a thorough understanding of how empire worked at the operational level and a guilt about his own participation in it that he spent the rest of his career trying to work out in prose. He adopted the pen name George Orwell when his first book was published in 1933; Eric Blair disappeared.

He lived among the poor in Paris and London, recording what he found in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). He picked hops in Kent, tramped the north of England to document unemployment and poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). He went to Spain in 1936 to report on the Civil War, ended up enlisting with the POUM militia (a Trotskyist faction), was shot through the throat by a sniper, and watched the Soviet-controlled Republican factions suppress their supposed allies. Homage to Catalonia (1938), his account of Spain, is one of the finest political memoirs in English, a book about the corruption of revolutionary ideals by power that would inform everything he wrote afterward.

His early novels — Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Coming Up for Air (1939) — are uneven but contain stretches of sharp social observation. The achievement that changed everything was Animal Farm (1945), a fable in which farm animals overthrow their human farmer, establish an egalitarian society, and are gradually dominated by the pigs, who revise history and consolidate power until the animals cannot tell the pigs from the humans they replaced. Written in 1943–44, it was rejected by several publishers reluctant to antagonize a wartime ally (the Soviet Union); when it appeared after the war, it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of political allegory.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was written while Orwell was dying of tuberculosis on the island of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides, in conditions of considerable discomfort and isolation. The novel imagines an England — Airstrip One — under a totalitarian system called Ingsoc, overseen by the never-seen Big Brother, enforced through the Thought Police and a bureaucracy dedicated to the systematic falsification of reality. Winston Smith, a middle-ranking Party member who works in the Ministry of Truth rewriting historical records, tries to hold onto the idea that objective reality exists and that his dissent from the Party is meaningful. The novel is a study in how totalitarianism attacks consciousness itself — not just behavior, but the capacity to think in ways the Party does not authorize. Doublethink, Newspeak, the memory hole, the Two Minutes Hate, Room 101 — these have entered the language and stayed there.

His essays are as important as his fiction. "Politics and the English Language" (1946), "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), "A Hanging" (1931), "Why I Write" (1946) — these are models of the personal-political essay, lucid and honest about their own contradictions. He insisted that good prose is democratic, that deliberate obscurity serves power, that the writer's first obligation is to see clearly and say what is seen.

The criticism of Orwell that has held up is largely biographical: his denunciation of suspected Communists to the British government's Information Research Department in 1949, when he was already dying, is difficult to square with his anti-totalitarian principles. His treatment of women — in his fiction and in his personal life — is ungenerous, and feminist critics have documented this carefully. His anti-imperialism coexisted with attitudes toward non-European peoples that were inconsistent with his professed values. These are real tensions. They don't make Nineteen Eighty-Four less prescient or "Politics and the English Language" less useful; they do complicate the saint-of-plain-speaking reputation that accumulated around him after his death.