George Orwell

Biography

Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), who wrote as George Orwell, lived the experiences that made 1984 possible. Born in India to a colonial family, he served as an Imperial Police officer in Burma from 1922–1927 — his first experience of how institutionalized power corrupts those who administer it, and how surveillance and violence maintain social order. He documented the psychological cost of this service in his essay 'Shooting an Elephant.' In 1937 he fought for a Trotskyist militia (POUM) in the Spanish Civil War and was shot through the throat by a sniper. More traumatically, he watched Stalinist agents systematically destroy the non-Stalinist left — show trials, purges, the rewriting of history in real time. The Spanish experience gave him the material for 1984's terror. From 1941–1943 he worked at the BBC Eastern Service, producing propaganda for British India — firsthand experience of the bureaucratic machinery of manufactured reality. He began writing 1984 in 1947, already dying of tuberculosis, on the remote Scottish island of Jura. He finished the manuscript in December 1948, too ill to retype it himself, and died in January 1950, eight months after the novel's publication. He never knew it would become the most important political novel of the twentieth century.

George Orwell at a glance