Through the mid part of the twentieth century George Orwell was prominent as a reporter on the social and political scene: he was one of those whose reporting helped to shape opinion and whose accounts now seem vital to understanding those times. Several of his essays have canonical status as much on historical as literary grounds. He published novels as well as non-fiction, but his two most famous novels,
Animal Farm and
Nineteen Eighty-Four, are continuous in aim and effect with his polemical writing. The impact of these two novels was immediately felt and is still being felt in the twenty-first century.
Milestones
25 June 1903 Eric Blair, British novelist and political writer who wrote under the name of GO, was born in
Motihari,
Bengal,
India, the middle one and the only boy in a family of three children.
1933 Eric Blair, using the pseudonym 'George Orwell', published his first book,
Down and Out in Paris and London, an account of his first-hand experiences with poverty in those cities.
17 August 1945 GO's dystopian political novel
Animal Farm was eventually published by the left-wing firm of
Secker and Warburg, after the end of the war in Europe which had caused its earlier rejections.
8 June 1949 GO published
Nineteen Eighty-Four, his well-known dystopian novel anatomising totalitarianism.
21 January 1950 GO, British novelist and political writer, died in
London of a tubercular haemorrhage.
