About George Orwell

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the British colonial government. This early exposure to imperial power structures would profoundly influence his political consciousness and later writing. Educated at Eton on a scholarship, Orwell experienced the British class system firsthand, observing the casual cruelty of privilege and the psychological damage of hierarchical societies. Rather than attending university, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that radicalized him against imperialism. Witnessing colonial brutality and recognizing his own complicity, he resigned in 1927 and spent several years living in poverty in London and Paris. These experiences, documented in "Down and Out in Paris and London," gave him intimate knowledge of poverty and exploitation. Unlike many socialist intellectuals who theorized about working-class struggle from comfortable distance, Orwell experienced it directly. The Spanish Civil War proved pivotal to Orwell's political development. He traveled to Spain in 1936 to fight against Franco's fascists, joining the POUM militia. There he witnessed Soviet communism's betrayal of the revolution—communists suppressing anarchists and socialists, prioritizing party control over defeating fascism. Orwell barely escaped Spain with his life after being shot through the throat. This experience taught him that totalitarianism could emerge from the left as easily as the right, that revolutionary ideals could be betrayed by those claiming to uphold them. Animal Farm emerged directly from Orwell's Spanish disillusionment. Published in 1945 after multiple rejections (publishers feared offending the Soviet Union, Britain's wartime ally), the novella satirizes the Russian Revolution's betrayal. Each character represents historical figures: Old Major is Marx/Lenin, Napoleon is Stalin, Snowball is Trotsky. The pigs' transformation from revolutionaries to oppressors mirrors Stalin's rise. Orwell wasn't attacking socialism itself but its corruption by totalitarianism. He remained a democratic socialist who believed in equality and workers' rights but understood that concentrating power inevitably corrupts.