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George Orwell
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George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair was a civil servant for the British government. In 1904 Orwell moved with his mother and sister to England where he remained until 1922. He began to write at an early age, and was even published in college periodicals, but he did not enjoy school. Orwell failed to win a university scholarship and without the opportunity to continue his education he went to Burma and served in the administration of the Indian Imperial Police from 1922 to 1927 when he resigned in part due to his growing dislike of British imperialism. When Orwell returned to Europe he was in poor financial condition and worked low paying jobs in France and England.
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George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal. He returned with his mother and sister to England in 1904. After a stint (1908-1922) at an Anglican day school in Henley, he boarded (1911-1916) unhappily at St. Cyprian's, a private preparatory school in Sussex. He then went to Eton (1917-1921) as a King's Scholar. He retained his scholarship even though an indifferent student. A. S. Gow, subsequently a noted Cambridge classicist, was his tutor for three of Blair's four years at Eton.
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George Orwell's last book, 1984 , has in a way been a victim of the success of Animal Farm, which most people were content to read as a straightforward allegory about the melancholy fate of the Russian revolution. From the minute Big Brother's moustache makes its appearance in the second paragraph of 1984 , many readers, thinking right away of Stalin, have tended to carry over the habit of point-for-point analogy from the earlier work. Although Big Brother's face certainly is Stalin's, just as the despised party heretic Emmanuel Goldstein's face is Trotsky's, the two do not quite line up with their models as neatly as Napoleon and Snowball did in Animal Farm . This did not keep the book from being marketed in the US as a sort of anticommunist tract. Published in 1949, it arrived in the McCarthy era, when "Communism" was damned officially as a monolithic, worldwide menace, and there was no point in even distinguishing between Stalin and Trotsky, any more than for shepherds to be instructing sheep in the nuances of wolf recognition.
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George Orwell attempted in 1940 after the outbreak of World War II to enlist in His Majesty's armed forces. Because of ill-health, he failed. Had he succeeded and been killed in action he would be remembered by academic specialists, if at all. He would have been noted as a minor, not too successful English novelist and memoir writer who had penned some interesting critical essays and as a man considered by many of his contemporaries to be a rude person.
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The British author George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, b. Motihari, India, June 25, 1903, d. London, Jan. 21, 1950, achieved prominence in the late 1940s as the author of two brilliant satires attacking totalitarianism. Familiarity with the novels, documentaries, essays, and criticism he wrote during the 1930s and later has since established him as one of the most important and influential voices of the century.
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Eric Arthur Blair (later George Orwell) was born in 1903 in the Indian Village Motihari, which lies near the border of Nepal. At that time India was a part of the British Empire, and Blair's father Richard ,held a post as an agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Blair's paternal grandfather too had been part of the British Raj ,and had served in the Indian Army. Eric's mother ,Ida Mabel Blair ,the daughter of a French tradesman, was about eighteen years younger than her husband Richard Blair . Eric had a elder sister called Marjorie. The Blairs led a relatively privileged and fairly pleasant existence, in helping to administer the Empire. Although the Blair family was not very wealthy - Orwell later described them ironically as "lower-upper-middle class" . They owned no property, had no extensive investments; they were like many middle-class English families of the time, totally dependent on the British Empire for their livelihood and prospects.
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