George Orwell or better known as Eric Blair was born in 1903 and died in 1937 by a gun shot to the neck. Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books of reportage. Georges father, Richard Orwell, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. Orwells mother brought him to england in 1904 when he was one and his father Richard until 1912. George had an older sister named Marjorie and a younger sister named Avril.
In 1908 Orwell was sent to a small Anglican parish school in Henley,two years later he was recommended to the headmaster of one of the most successful preparatory schools in England which he attended on a scolarship and his parents only need to pay for half of all his expences. After a term at Wellington, Eric moved to Eton, where he was a King's Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism.
Orwell adopted his pen name in 1933, while writing for the New Adelphi. He chose a pen name that stressed his deep, lifelong affection for the English tradition and countryside. Orwell lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work. He eventually found work as a schoolteacher until ill health forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead. Soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell volunteered to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalist uprising. As a sympathiser of the Independent Labour Party, he joined the militia of its sister party in Spain, the non-Stalinist far-left POUM in which he fought as an infantryman. saw as the betrayal of that workers' revolution in Spain by the Spanish Communist Party, abetted by the Soviet Union and its secret police, after its militia attacked the anarchists and the POUM in Barcelona in May 1937.
Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great critical and popular success.
Between 1936 and 1945 Orwell was married to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, with whom he adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair (b. May of 1944). She died in 1945 during an operation. In the autumn of 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell. Orwell died at the age of 46 from tuberculosis which he had probably contracted during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life.






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