He is best known for his satires of totalitarian rule: Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Through his autobiographical work about poverty in London ( Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933), his experiences in colonial Burma ( Burmese Days, 1934) and in the Spanish Civil War ( Homage to Catalonia, 1938), and the plight of unemployed coal miners in England ( The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937), Blair (who wrote under the name George Orwell) exposed and critiqued the human tendency to oppress others politically, economically, and physically. From 1922-27 he served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. “The proper way to remember George Orwell, finally, is not as a man of numbers-1984 will pass, not Nineteen Eighty–Four-but as a man of letters,” wrote Paul Gray, “who wanted to change the world by changing the word.Eric Blair was born and spent his youth in India. But obsessing over how it matched up to its fictional depiction was missing the point, the article posited. “That Year Is Almost Here,” the headline proclaimed. 4, 1946,) Orwell parodied the Communist system in terms of barnyard satire but in 1984 … there is not a smile or a jest that does not add bitterness to Orwell’s utterly depressing vision of what the world may be in 35 years’ time.ĭecades later, as the real-life 1984 approached, TIME dedicated a cover story to Orwell’s earlier vision of what that year could have been like. How Winston and Julia rebelled, fell in love and paid the penalty in the terroristic world of tomorrow is the thread on which Britain’s George Orwell has spun his latest and finest work of fiction. In short, the grim, grey London Times could not have been referring to Winston and Julia when it snorted contemptuously: “Old-thinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc,” i.e., “Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.” And Party-Member Julia was outwardly so goodthinkful (naturally orthodox) that, after a brilliant girlhood in the Spies, she became active in the Junior Anti-Sex League and was snapped up by Pornosec, a subsection of the government Fiction Department that ground out happy-making pornography for the masses.

After all, Party-Member Winston Smith was one of the Ministry of Truth’s most trusted forgers he had always flung himself heart & soul into the falsification of government statistics. In Britain 1984 A.D., no one would have suspected that Winston and Julia were capable of crimethink (dangerous thoughts) or a secret desire for ownlife (individualism).

1984 by george orwell