George Orwell Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

George Orwell was the pseudonym of Erich Arthur Blair (1903–1950), a journalist, essayist, literary critic, and novelist. His writing career culminated in the dystopia presented in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), originally titled Last Man in Europe. Although Nineteen Eighty-Four received mixed reviews, it continues to be widely read and has contributed new words and phrases to the modern vocabulary of politics. These include doublethink, an ability to embrace two contradictory beliefs simultaneously; newspeak, a partisan tool for limiting thought by eliminating undesirable words or concepts; Big Brother, a name for autonomous, unaccountable governmental authority; and Orwellian, referring to any idea or action incompatible with a free society.

Erich Blair was born in India on June 25, 1903. Most of his youth was spent in a private preparatory school in Sussex, England. After attending Eton College on a scholarship, he took up his father’s profession and joined the Indian Imperial Police force. However, his distaste for British imperial rule, coupled with an intense desire to be a writer, led him to abandon a career in the civil service. After resigning from his post in 1927, Blair lived in the East End of London and in the slums of Paris, the gathering places, he later wrote, as quoted in the 1956 Orwell Reader, “for eccentric people—people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent.” Poverty, he believed, had freed “them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work. «These experiences living and working among the poor provided material for Blair’s first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). It was the first of his nine books published under the pen name George Orwell.

By the mid-1930s, Orwell had established himself as a journalist and political writer. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he vividly described the poverty in England’s industrial north. He also declared his commitment to the values of socialism, even while remaining critical of socialism’s disciples. When war broke out in Spain, he set aside his political differences with fellow socialists and traveled to Barcelona to join the Marxist Workers’ Party (POUM) militia in their fight against fascism. A few months later, when the communists began their purges of the leftist party, he was forced to flee Spain. After arriving in France in 1937, Orwell began writing Homage to Catalonia (1938). Fellow left-wing intellectuals, who regarded the communists as war heroes, took issue with Orwell’s account of events in Spain. Although a life-long socialist, Orwell continued to distance himself from the British radical intelligentsia, many of whom, he thought, had blindly accepted communist doctrines. His satirical novel Animal Farm (1945) used allegory to further attack the Russian Revolution (1917) and the Communist Party’s subsequent betrayal of socialist ideals.

After World War II (1939–1945), the world appeared to Orwell to be headed for disaster, and he sought to change the course of events by inventing a language that might enable its inhabitants to better grasp their predicament. He started the first drafts of Nineteen Eighty-Four in early 1947, laying out a futuristic totalitarian world. After the novel’s publication in 1948, it became, for many of his readers, not how far away society was from the physical and psychological brutality of Orwell’s imaginary Oceania, but how close the approximation was. Orwell died from tuberculosis in a London hospital on January 21, 1950.

Bibliography:

Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journals and Letters. Vols. 1–4. Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968.
The Orwell Reader. Edited by Richard H. Rovere. New York: Harcourt, 1956.
Taylor, D. J. Orwell:The Life. New York: Holt, 2003.
Williams, Raymond. George Orwell. New York: Viking, 1971.

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