Maria Jose Perez Gonzalez

Biography of George Orwell

George Orwell was the pseudonym of the English writer Eric Arthur
Blair, born in Motihari, Bengal, India, as the second child of Richard Walmesley
Blair and Ida Mabel Limonzin. His father was a civil servant in the opium
department and his mother came from a family of Burma. In 1904 Orwell
moved with his mother and sister to England. Orwell published his first writings
in college magazines.
Orwell failed to win a scholarship to university and in 1922 he went to
Burma to serve in the Indian Imperial Police (1922-27) as an assistant
superintendent.
Disliking the imperialism, he resigned and returned to England in 1927. In
1928, he went to Paris in order to become a writer. After his money ran out, he
worked as a dishwasher and at the end of 1929, he returned to England and
became a tramp and a beggar, roaming the countryside. This experience will
appear in his book Down and out in Paris and London (1933), the year when he
assumed the pen-name by which he would sign all his publications. Unable to
support himself with his writings, Orwell worked as a teacher in a private
school, where he finished his first novel, Burmese days (1934)
In 1936 Orwell married Eileen O'Shaugnessy and from 1936 to 1940 he
worked as a shopkeeper in Wallingford, Hertfordshire.
In the1930s Orwell had adopted socialistic views and travelled to Spain
to report on the Civil War. He fought alongside the United Workers Marxist
Party militia and was wounded in the neck. Orwell's book on Spain, Homage to
Catalonia , appeared in 1938.
During World War II he served as a sergeant in the Home Guard and
worked as a journalist for the BBC, Observer and Tribune, where he was
literary editor from 1943 to 1945. Towards the end of the war he wrote Animal
Farm. The cruel satire of Communist ideology in Animal Farm made Orwell for
the first time prosperous. After the war Orwell lived mostly in Jura, in the
Western Isles of Scotland.
His other important success was Nineteen Eighty-Four, a bitter protest
against the absurd direction in which the author believed the modern world was
moving.
Orwell's wife died in 1945 and in 1949 he married Sonia Browell. Orwell
died at forty-seven from tuberculosis in London on January 21, 1950, soon after
the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four . He left behind a substantial body of
work, a growing reputation, and the conviction that modern man was inadequate
to face the demands of his history.