George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was a British author. Noted as a political and cultural commentator, as well as an accomplished novelist, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the twentieth century. He is possibly best known for two novels written towards the end of his life, in the 1940s; the political allegory Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which describes a totalitarian dystopia so vividly that the adjective "Orwellian" is now used to describe totalitarian mechanisms of thought control.

Orwell's work

During most of his career Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British in books of reportage such as Homage to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil War), Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), and The Road to Wigan Pier which described the living conditions of poor miners in northern England. According to Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt."

Related Topics:
Journalism - Homage to Catalonia - Spanish Civil War - Down and Out in Paris and London - The Road to Wigan Pier - Newsweek - Hazlitt

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism. Orwell had returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist, but he remained to the end a man of the left and, in his own words, a "democratic socialist".

Related Topics:
Animal Farm - Nineteen Eighty-Four - Russian Revolution - Stalinism - Totalitarianism - Democratic - Socialist

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~