by George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair was bom in Motihari, Bengal, India on June 25, 1903, to English parents. Though offered a university scholarship, Blair instead opted to serve in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. On leave in England in 1927, he dropped out and decided against returning to Burma. Troubled by the caste and racial barriers that had prevented him from getting to know a wider cross-section of the populace there, he began mixing with the downtrodden of Europe, gathering material for Down and Out in Paris and London. He changed his name upon the publication of this first book (1933) to George Orwell after the Orwell River in Suffolk, England. In his fiction and essays, Orwell stresses the importance of intellectual and human liberty, attacking imperialism, totalitarianism, and leftwing hypocrisy as its enemies. These convictions found perhaps their ultimate literary expression in his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four...