Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote under the pen name George Orwell, was born to British parents on June 25, 1903 in India. Blair moved with his mother and two sisters to England the following year, however his father remained an employee of the Indian Civil Service and the family was not reunited again until 1912. Blair attended Cyprian then Eton boarding schools but was unable to earn a scholarship to university thus, in 1922, he joined the British Imperial Police and was stationed in Burma (present-day Myanmar), which was a province of British India at the time. Blair spent five years in service and these experiences form the basis of his novel Burmese Days (1934).

Returning to England in 1927, Blair was keen to understand the experiences of the oppressed and began exploring the city’s poorer sections, even dressing like a tramp and adopting a different name. For some time he lived in a working class district of Paris, where he worked as a journalist and undertook further research into unemployment and poverty. Collectively, these experiences form the basis of Blair’s published articles contemporary to the time and his first novel Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

Blair’s The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1936, for which he spent two months investigating the social conditions of economically depressed miners in the north of England, contributed to Blair’s support for democratic socialism. Concerned with the threat totalitarianism was posing to freedom in Europe, Blair joined the Spanish Civil War, where he fought with the Republicans. Homage to Catalonia (1938) is based on Blair’s war experiences.

The political satire novella Animal Farm, Blair’s first major success, and which shares similar dystopian ideas with Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published in 1945.

Blair’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, whom he married in 1936, died of cardiac arrest during an operation in 1945. Devastated by the loss, Blair retired to a remote Scottish Island, Jura, with their adopted son Richard and a housekeeper/nanny, where he wrote his final masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Blair married Sonia Brownell in 1949.

After years of suffering with advanced tuberculosis, Blair died in 1950. He had entrusted Sonia with the management of his estate and in working with his editors and copyright lawyers after his death.

Blair leaves an extensive literary legacy in the form of novels, essays, journal articles and critical reviews, and a lasting influence on language and writing.