Nineteen Eighty-Four - Grand Format

Biographie de George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India. In 1907 his family moved to England where he went to school. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police Force in Burma, which inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934) . Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, working as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and writing for various periodicals.
Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by the publisher Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a description of the poverty he saw there. In 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the Spanish Civil War. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote the novel Coming Up for Air.
During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC . As literary editor of Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and for the Manchester Evening News. The political allegory, Animal Farm, was published in 1945 and, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), brought him world-wide fame. George Orwell died in London in January 1950.