OUIL504 - About the Author - George Orwell

He won two scholarships to Winchester and Eton, chose to go to Eton.

He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer.

He felt guilty about the seperation that race had caused between him and the Burmese people so he went and lived with poor people in London and France for a bit.

In the 1930's he began to consider himself a socialist 

In 1936 he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in Northern England

Animal Farm

Captioned 'a fairy story', Animal Farm is anything but that. Sick and tired of maltreatment under their enslavement from man, the animals of Manor Farm revolt. Released from all chains, there is but one key rule: All animals are equal. Yet, as the story progresses we soon see some animals are more equal than others…

Written in an elegantly simple style, Orwell uses the turmoil faced on the farm by the animals as a metaphor for the Russian Revolution itself. It shows how a people's fight for freedom can so quickly morph into a power play as chaos ensues. Orwell cleverly plants lies, illiteracy and even a head hunt throughout the novel to explain the oppression, propaganda and elaborate excuses that led to the rise of the Soviet dictatorship.

1984

1984 is a Dystopian Novel by Orwell which was first published in 1949.

In Orwell's essay 'Why I Write' all his serious work which was written after the Spanish Civil War in 1936 "was written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" 

Therefore 1984 is seen to be a cautionary tale against totalitarianism and in particular the betrayal of a revolution by those claiming to defend it.

Orwell bases many aspects of the society in 1984 upon the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The "Two Minutes Hate" for instance, which was based upon Stalinism's habitual demonisation of its enemies and rivals. Also the description of Big Brother himself has similarities to that of Stalin.