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Book Home  Books Information George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better
known by the pen name George Orwell was a British author. Noted
as a political and cultural commentator, as well as an accomplished
novelist, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language
essayists of the twentieth century, though he is possibly best
known for two novels written towards the end of his brief life,
in the 1940s; the political allegory Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty-Four. The latter describes a totalitarian dystopia so vividly
that the adjective "Orwellian" is now commonly used
to describe totalitarian mechanisms of thought control
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Orwell's work
During most of his career Orwell was best known for his journalism,
both in the British press and in books of reportage such as Homage
to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil
War), Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty
in these cities), and The Road to Wigan Pier (which described the
living conditions of poor miners in northern England). According to
Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest journalist of his day and the
foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt."
Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell
as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles
Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is considered an
allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian
Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision
of the results of totalitarianism. Orwell denied that Animal Farm
was a reference to Stalinism. Orwell had returned from Catalonia a
staunch anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist, but he remained to the
end a man of the left and, in his own words, a "democratic socialist".
Orwell is also known for his insights about the political
implications of the use of language. In the essay "Politics and
the English Language", he decries the effects of cliché,
bureaucratic euphemism, and academic jargon on literary styles, and
ultimately on thought itself. Orwell's concern over the power of language
to shape reality is also reflected in his invention of Newspeak, the
official language of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is a variant of English in which vocabulary
is strictly limited by government fiat. The goal is to make it increasingly
difficult to express ideas that contradict the official line —
with the final aim of making it impossible even to conceive such ideas.
(cf. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). A number of words and phrases that Orwell
coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the standard vocabulary,
such as "memory hole," "Big Brother," "Room
101," "doublethink," "thought police," "unperson",
and "newspeak."
The comprehensive edition of Orwell's work was edited
by Peter Davison and published in 20 volumes in 1998.
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