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Mariela G.

Castrillo Mrquez

George Orwell

A Portrait of the Writer

George

Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.

"We

need intelligent propaganda. Less about 'class consciousness,' 'expropriation of the expropriators,' 'bourgeois ideology,' and 'proletarian solidarity'...and more about justice, liberty, and the difficulty of the unemployed.

George Orwell

Literary career

Literary criticism
Poetry Fiction Polemical journalism -> essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage

Career Path

Chose to live in poverty Wrote Down and Out in Paris and London Exposed harsh working conditions of the poor Investigated Englands coal-mining industry Wrote The Road to Wigan Pier Exposed terrible conditions of the miners Grew to hate a class system Became a socialist

Works
George Orwell is renowned as a master of plain English prose style. He wrote in a very political era the 1930s and 1940s.

He was a master of lucidity, of saying what he meant, of exposing the falsity of what he called double-think

Martin Seymour Smith

Animal

Farm (1945)

Its Orwells satirical allegory of the betrayal of the Russian Revolution.


Fusion of political and artistic purpose

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Nineteen

Eighty-Four (1949)

Orwells best-known work. The title alone has passed into common use as a term for a totalitarian dystopia. His final novel Grim vision of future society

Homage

to Catalonia (1938)

This is possibly Orwells best book. It offers a brilliant first-hand account of the Spanish civil war, in which he fought between 1936 and 1937.

The

Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

First half sociological investigations of living conditions amongst the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire

Second half a long essay on his middle-class upbringing

The

Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

"The Orwell" at Wigan Pier, formerly Gibson's warehouse, originally built in 1777, re-built in 1984.

Essays

These are perceptive and well-written meditations on politics, nationalism, language, and what we now call mass communications newspapers, radio, and popular culture.
Shooting an Elephant (1936) The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941) and Why I Write (1946).

Writing Career

Orwell wrote more than 350 articles during his journalism career. Poetry isn't usually connected with Orwell, but he wrote 17 well-received poems. Orwell also wrote scripts, a play and 29 collections of short stories. Besides his most famous novels, Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell wrote four other novels. Orwell wrote three semi-autobiographical books

"Orwell was a very austere and puritanical kind of man. He went to one of the most famous private schools in England, but he was very skeptical of the system and he always wanted to know how the poor lived. He served for a while in the Burma police in the old imperial days and he sort of came back to England saying he wanted to know if we treated our natives -meaning our working class -- the way we treated the natives in Burma. And, on the whole, he thought we did." Sir Bernard Crick George Orwell: A life

Why I write
His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in -at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own-- but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

Why I write

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, AGAINST totalitarianism and FOR democratic socialism, as I understand it.

Four

motives to writing according to Orwell

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to be remembered

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity. (iv) Political purpose. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

Quotes

" If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
" Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "

Quotes

" Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. "

" Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. "

for your attention!

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