(born 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India—died Jan. 21, 1950, London, Eng.) British novelist, essayist, and critic. Instead of accepting a scholarship to a university, Orwell went to Burma to serve in the Indian Imperial Police (1922–27), an experience that changed him into a literary and political rebel.
On returning to Europe, he lived in self-imposed poverty, gaining material for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), and became a socialist. He went to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War and stayed to join the Republican militia. His war experiences, which gave him a lifelong dread of communism (he would later provide British intelligence services with lists of his fellow British communists), are recounted in Homage to Catalonia (1938). His novels typically portray a sensitive, conscientious, emotionally isolated individual at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. His most famous works are the anti-Soviet satirical fable Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a dystopic vision of totalitarianism whose influence was widely felt in the postwar decades. His literary essays are also admired.
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