George Orwell Research Essay Research Paper Eric

George Orwell Research Essay, Research Paper

Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903 at Motihari in British-occupied India.

While growin up, he attended private schools in Sussex, Wellington and

Eton. He worked at the Imperial Indian Police untill 1927 when he went to

London to study the poverty stricken. He then moved to Paris where he

wrote two lost novels. After he moved back to England he wrote Down and

Out in Paris and London, Burmese Days, A Clergyman.s Daughter and Keep the

Apidistra Flying. He published all four under the psuedonym George

Orwell. He then married Eileen O.Shaughnessy and wrote The Road to Wigan

Pier. Orwell then joined the Army and fought in the Spanish civil war.

He became a socialist revolutionary and wrote Homage to Catalonia, Coming

Up for Air, and in 1943, he wrote Animal Farm. It.s success ended

Orwell.s financial troubles forever. In 1947 and 48 despite Tuberculosis,

he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. He died in 1950 (Williams 7-15). This

essay will show and prove to you that George Orwell.s life has influenced

modern society a great deal.

BIOGRAPHY

In 1903, Eric Arthur Blair was born. Living in India until he was four,

Blair and his family then moved to England and settled at Henley. At the

age of eight, Blair was sent to a private school in Sussex, and he lived

there, except on holidays, until he was thirteen. He went to two private

secondary schools: Wellington(for one term) and Eton (for four and a half

years).

After Eton, Blair joined the Imperial Indian Police and was trained in

Burma. He served there for nearly five years and then in 1927, while hom

on leave, decided not to return. He later wrote that he had come to

understand and reject the imperialism he was serving. He was

struck…between hatred of the empire and rage against the native people

who opposed it, and made his immediate job more difficult. Blair, on his

first six months of release, traveled to the East End to research the

English poor.

In Spring of 1928, he took a room in a working-class district of Paris.

He wrote two novels, which have been lost, as well as publishing a number

of articles in French and English. He became ill with pneumonia, worked

ten weeks as a dishwasher and kitchen porter, and returned to England at

the end of 1929.

He used his parents. home in Suffolk for writing and earned money from

occasional articles and teaching. Blair then completed several versions

of what was to become his first book, called, not by his choice, Down and

Out in Paris and London. The book was a record of his experiences, but

.If it.s all the same to everybody, I would prefer [it] to be published

pseudonymously..

Discussing the publication of his first book with his agent, he decided

on three possible pseudonyms: Keneth Miles, George Orwell and H. Lewis

Allways. He favored George Orwell. The Orwell is a river in Suffolk,

south of his parents. home. .George Orwell. published his first book in

1933. Down and Out… was followed by the novel Burmese Days, published

first in the United States rather than in England because of his English

publishers fear of it.s giving offence in Burma. After Burmese Days came

two more novels: A Clergyman.s Daughter, published in 1935; and Keep the

Apidistra Flying, published in 1936.

In the Spring of 1936 he moved to Hertfordshire and married Eileen

O.Shaughnessy, an Oxford graduate in English, a teacher, a journalist, and

later a London graduate in psychology. Orwell.s reputation at this time

was based mainly on his accounts of poverty and depression. His next

book, The Road to Wigan Pier was written for the Left Book Club and

started his career as a political writer. Much of this book was composed

of an essay on class and socialism, which was Orwell.s first statement of

his political possition.

In July, he left for Spain to fight (and write) in the Spanish civil war.

For the next two or three years, Orwell became a revolutionary socialist.

When he returned from war , he wrote Homage to Catalonia and in the winter

of 1938, wrote Coming Up for Air. In 1941 he wrote London Letter.s and in

August joined the BBC as a talks producer in the Indian Section of the

Eastern Service. Later in the year, he began writing Animal Farm. It did

not appear until August 1945, at the end of the war.

He and his wife adopted a son in 1944, but in 1945 his wife died during

an opperation. Animal Farm.s success ended Orwell.s financial worries

that he had suffered from for twenty years. In 1946, he settled in Jura,

Scottland, with his younger sister as houskeeper, though he returned to

lundon for the winter. During 1947, in the early stages of renewed

tuberculosis, he wrote the first drafts of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 1948,

amid several attacks, Orwell wrote the second draft. In September, 1949,