George Orwell Archive

 

George Orwell

George Orwell

1903-1950

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. He took the pseudonym George Orwell in the early 30s. An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s he had begun to consider himself a socialist. In 1936, he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in northern England, which resulted in 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. Late in 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist. There is no indication that Orwell ever abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings.


Biography

Works

The Road to Wigan Pier, March 1937

Homage to Catalonia, April 1938

Why I join the I.L.P., June 1938

Democracy in the British Army, September 1939

Answers to a Questionnaire on the War, November 1941

Animal Farm, 1945

The Freedom of the Press, 1945

Why I Write, summer 1946

Preface to Kolghosp Tvaryn, March 1947

“Who controls the past controls the future:
Who controls the present controls the past.”
[Orwell, 1984]

 

Archive maintained by Jonas Holmgren