A Year: Day to Day Men: 25th of June

The Hidden Balcony

June 25, 1903 is the birthdate of the British author, George Orwell.

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25th of 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. Educated in England at Eton, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. In 1928, Orwell moved to Paris where lack of success there as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs. He described these experiences in his first book, “Down and Out in Paris and London”, published in 1933. It was shortly before the book’s publication that he changed his name to George Orwell.

An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s Orwell had begun to consider himself a socialist. In 1936, he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in northern England, which resulted in his 1937 published non-fiction work “The Road to Wigan Pier’” documenting his experience of working class life in the north of England.

Late in 1936, Orwell had travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist. The account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, “Homage to Catalonia” was published in 1938.

In March of 1943 George Orwell started work on his new book, which turned out to be “Animal Farm”. By April of 1944 the book was ready for publication; however, publishing houses refused to publish it, considering it an attack on the Soviet regime which at that time was a crucial ally in the war. Orwell’s allegorical novella “Animal Farm” was finally published in Britain on August 17, 1945, and a year later in the United States on August 26, 1946. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell’s name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life.

His book “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was published four years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with its title and many phrases – such as “Big Brother is watching you”, “newspeak”, “thoughtcrime”, and “doublethink” – entering popular use. Orwell’s health had continued to decline since a diagnosis of tuberculosis in December of 1947. In the early morning of January 21, 1950, an artery burst in Orwell’s lungs, killing him at the age of 46. His body is buried in All Saints Churchyard, Oxfordshire, under his birth name Eric Arthur Blair.