George Orwell was the pen name for Eric Arthur Blair, an Englishman who was born in India in 1903 and died in 1950, only a year after the publication of 1984. His family returned to England when he was four years old, and he was educated in private schools where he showed an interest in writing from a very young age. After leaving high school, Orwell worked for the British Imperial Police in Burma, which inspired his famous essay "Shooting an Elephant." This experience also exposed him to the shameful practices of the British Empire in colonized lands, which would be a recurring theme in his literary works.
When he returned from Burma, Orwell lived in both Paris and London, making a...
