Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote as George Orwell, was born in 1903 in Motihari, British India, where his father served in the Opium Department. Educated at Eton on a scholarship, he rejected imperial service and instead joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that produced the memoir Burmese Days and a lasting hatred of colonial arrogance. Returning to Europe, he tramped among the poor, washed dishes in Paris, and documented hardship in Down and Out in Paris and London.

Orwell fought with the POUM militia during the Spanish Civil War, where he was shot through the neck and witnessed Stalinist suppression of rival left factions—events crystallized in Homage to Catalonia. During the Second World War he worked for the BBC and wrote for Tribune, sharpening the plain, concrete prose style that became his trademark. Animal Farm (1945) satirized the Soviet Union as a fable; Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), completed while he suffered from tuberculosis, imagined a state that controlled reality through language, surveillance, and perpetual war.

Orwell died in January 1950 in a London hospital at forty-six, leaving essays on politics and language that remain unmatched in clarity. Terms he popularized—Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Newspeak—became permanent vocabulary for discussing propaganda and authoritarianism in democracies as well as dictatorships.

1. 1922

   Burma Police Service

   Served five years in the Indian Imperial Police, absorbing anti-imperial convictions.

2. 1936

   Spanish Civil War

   Joined POUM militia in Barcelona; wounded and forced to flee Stalinist purges.

3. 1945

   Animal Farm Published

   Released the anti-Stalinist fable after wartime publishing delays.

4. 1949

   Nineteen Eighty-Four

   Published his final novel while gravely ill with pulmonary tuberculosis.

5. 1950

   Death in London

   Died at University College Hospital; buried under his real name in Oxfordshire.