Orwell G

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950),^[1] better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and essayist, journalist and critic, whose work is characterised by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.^[2][3][4]

As a writer, Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism; and is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopiannovel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell second among "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".^[5]

Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian" – describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices – is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", and "Hate week", "Room 101", the "memory hole", and "Newspeak", "doublethink" and "proles", "unperson" and "thoughtcrime".^[6][7]

• 1Life
  • 1.1Early years
  • 1.2Policing in Burma
  • 1.3London and Paris
  • 1.4Southwold
  • 1.5Teaching career
  • 1.6Hampstead
  • 1.7*The Road to Wigan Pier*
  • 1.8Spanish Civil War
  • 1.9Rest and recuperation
  • 1.10Second World War and *Animal Farm*
  • 1.11Jura and *Nineteen Eighty-Four*
  • 1.12Final months and death
• 2Literary career and legacy
  • 2.1Literary influences
  • 2.2Orwell as literary critic
  • 2.3Food writing
  • 2.4Reception and evaluations of Orwell's works
  • 2.5Influence on language and writing
  • 2.6Modern culture
  • 2.7Statue
• 3Personal life
  • 3.1Childhood
  • 3.2Relationships and marriage
  • 3.3Social interactions
  • 3.4Lifestyle
• 4Views
  • 4.1Religion
  • 4.2Politics
  • 4.3Sexuality
• 5Biographies of Orwell
• 6Bibliography
  • 6.1Novels
  • 6.2Nonfiction
• 7Notes
• 8References
• 9Sources
• 10Further reading
• 11External links

Life

Early years

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, British India.^[8] His great-grandfather, Charles Blair, was a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of plantations in Jamaica.^[9] His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman.^[10] Although the gentility passed down the generations, the prosperity did not; Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class".^[11]

His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service.^[12] His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father was involved in speculative ventures.^[9] Eric had two sisters: Marjorie, five years older; and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one year old, his mother took him and Marjorie to England.^{[13][n 1]} His birthplace and ancestral house in Motihari has been declared a protected monument of historical importance.^[14]

In 1904 Ida Blair settled with her children at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit in mid-1907,^[15] the family did not see their husband or father, Richard Blair, until 1912.^[10] His mother's diary from 1905 describes a lively round of social activity and artistic interests.

Before the First World War, the family moved to Shiplake, Oxfordshire where Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially their daughter Jacintha. When they first met, he was standing on his head in a field. On being asked why, he said, "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up."^[16] Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry, and dreamed of becoming famous writers. He said that he might write a book in the style of H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. During this period, he also enjoyed shooting, fishing and birdwatching with Jacintha's brother and sister.^[16]

...

Literary influences

In an autobiographical piece that Orwell sent to the editors of Twentieth Century Authors in 1940, he wrote: "The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills." Elsewhere, Orwell strongly praised the works of Jack London, especially his book The Road. Orwell's investigation of poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier strongly resembles that of Jack London's The People of the Abyss, in which the American journalist disguises himself as an out-of-work sailor to investigate the lives of the poor in London. In his essay "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946) Orwell wrote: "If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them."

Orwell was an admirer of Arthur Koestler and became a close friend during the three years that Koestler and his wife Mamain spent at the cottage of Bwlch Ocyn, a secluded farmhouse that belonged to Clough Williams-Ellis, in the Vale of Ffestiniog. Orwell reviewed Koestler's. Darkness at Noon for the New Statesman in 1941, saying:

Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant literature, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow "confessions" by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods. What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened – for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society – but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.^[122]

Other writers admired by Orwell included: Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Gissing, Graham Greene, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Tobias Smollett, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.^[123] He was both an admirer and a critic of Rudyard Kipling,^[124][125] praising Kipling as a gifted writer and a "good bad poet" whose work is "spurious" and "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting," but undeniably seductive and able to speak to certain aspects of reality more effectively than more enlightened authors.^[126] He had a similarly ambivalent attitude to G. K. Chesterton, whom he regarded as a writer of considerable talent who had chosen to devote himself to "Roman Catholic propaganda",^[127] and to Evelyn Waugh, who was, he wrote, "ab[ou]t as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions".^[128]...

In 2003, declassified British archives belonging to the British Foreign Office revealed that George Orwell secretly accused Chaplin of being a secret communist and a friend of the USSR.^[289] Chaplin's name was one of 35 Orwell gave to the Information Research Department (IRD), a secret British Cold War propaganda department which worked closely with the CIA, according to a 1949 document known as Orwell's list.^[289] Chaplin was not the only actor in America Orwell accused of being a secret communist. He also described American civil-rights leader and actor Paul Robeson as being "anti-white".^[289]