George Orwell Biography Quotes 89 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, in British-ruled India. His father worked in the Indian Civil Service, and his mother took him to England while he was still a child. He grew up in what he later characterized as a modest stratum of the English middle classes, conscious of social gradations and the costs of respectability. A scholarship boy, he attended St Cyprian's prep school and then Eton College, where he excelled as a reader and writer but showed little interest in pursuing a university degree. Among his contemporaries at Eton was Cyril Connolly, who would later become a literary ally and editor.

Policing in Burma and Awakening
In 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, a career that exposed him to the realities of imperial rule. The experience left him with a lasting sense of the moral compromises of empire. He later mined this period for essays and fiction, notably the essay Shooting an Elephant and the novel Burmese Days. Disillusioned and increasingly critical of the system he served, he resigned in 1927 and returned to England determined to live by his pen.

Return to Europe and the Making of George Orwell
Back in Europe, he lived frugally in London and Paris, observing and sharing the lives of people at the margins. These experiences became the basis of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), the first book he published under the name George Orwell, a pseudonym he adopted to separate his writing life from his past and family. He followed with Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), each probing the pressures of poverty, conformity, and the small tyrannies of everyday life. He married Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1936, a partnership that combined affection with a practical commitment to work, politics, and shared hardship.

Political Commitment and the Spanish Civil War
In late 1936 he traveled to Spain to report on and support the Republican cause against Franco. He enlisted with the POUM militia in Catalonia and was wounded in the throat at the front. The internecine conflicts among anti-fascist factions, and the crackdown on the POUM, left a deep impression. Homage to Catalonia (1938) recounts these events with a plainspoken clarity that challenged partisan narratives. His anti-totalitarian convictions were sharpened by this experience and deepened through his contact with writers such as Arthur Koestler, whose own encounters with political repression paralleled and reinforced Orwell's evolving views.

Reporting Britain and the Coming War
Returning to England, he turned his attention to domestic conditions. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), commissioned by the publisher Victor Gollancz, combined reportage on working-class life in the north of England with a candid exploration of his own political instincts. Coming Up for Air (1939) captured a mood of prewar anxiety. As Europe slid into conflict, he developed a distinctly English radicalism skeptical of dogma and attentive to ordinary life, themes he explored in essays and reviews for periodicals including Cyril Connolly's Horizon.

War Years, Journalism, and the BBC
During the Second World War he worked for the BBC's Eastern Service, scripting cultural and news broadcasts aimed at audiences in South Asia. He left the BBC in 1943, frustrated by bureaucracy, and became literary editor of the weekly Tribune, where he wrote criticism and the column As I Please. He also reviewed books for the Observer, building a friendship with its editor David Astor, who later offered critical moral and practical support. Essays from this period, including The Lion and the Unicorn and Politics and the English Language, crystallized his belief that clear writing was a political act.

Animal Farm and After
Animal Farm (1945), an allegorical fable about the corruption of revolutionary ideals, had faced rejections from several publishers, including on political grounds, before being taken on by Secker and Warburg under Fredric Warburg. Its success brought him international attention and financial stability. The aftermath was bittersweet: his health, always fragile, deteriorated, and personal life brought both joy and loss. Eileen O'Shaughnessy died in 1945 during surgery. The previous year they had adopted a son, Richard Blair, and after Eileen's death Orwell took on the responsibilities of single parenthood with the help of friends and family, including his sister Avril.

Jura, Illness, and Nineteen Eighty-Four
Seeking quiet and clean air, he moved in 1946 to the remote Scottish island of Jura, where he lived simply and worked intensively despite worsening illness. There he drafted and revised Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dystopian novel published in 1949 that drew together his lifelong concerns about language, surveillance, and ideological coercion. The book reflected not only the pressures of the age but also the craft shaped by decades of observation and reportage. His circle during these years included writers and editors such as Arthur Koestler and Cyril Connolly, as well as the practical support of David Astor. He registered the bleakness of postwar politics while still insisting on the possibility of individual integrity.

Final Months and Death
In the late 1940s he received treatment for tuberculosis in various hospitals and sanatoria. In 1949 he married Sonia Brownell, who had worked at Horizon and who became a dedicated guardian of his work. He died on 21 January 1950 at University College Hospital in London. Friends and colleagues remembered his independence of mind, austerity of habit, and deep sense of fairness, while his family life, including his bond with his son Richard, added a private counterpoint to the public figure.

Themes, Style, and Legacy
Orwell's prose is notable for its clarity, plain diction, and moral urgency. He treated writing as a tool for truth-telling, especially about power and its disguises. From Down and Out in Paris and London through Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he developed a body of work that linked reportage, satire, and political analysis. Encounters with figures such as Victor Gollancz, Fredric Warburg, Cyril Connolly, Henry Miller, Arthur Koestler, and David Astor helped shape the venues, debates, and friendships through which his ideas traveled. Across novels, essays, reviews, and journalism, he left an enduring map of the 20th century's illusions and pressures, and a standard for honest writing that continues to guide readers and writers long after his death.

Our collection contains 89 quotes who is written by George, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Justice.

Other people realated to George: Aldous Huxley (Novelist), H.G. Wells (Author), P. G. Wodehouse (Writer), Claud Cockburn (Journalist), Thomas Pynchon (Writer), Bill Brandt (Photographer), Christopher Isherwood (Author), Yevgeny Zamyatin (Novelist), Donald Pleasence (Actor), Lorin Maazel (Musician)

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