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Who Was George Orwell?
George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist and critic most famous for his novels 'Animal Farm' (1945) and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' (1949). George Orwell was a novelist, essayist and critic best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism.
Family & Early Life:
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, India, on June 25, 1903. The son of a British civil servant, Orwell spent his first days in India, where his father was stationed. His mother brought him and his older sister, Marjorie, to England about a year after his birth and settled in Henley-on-Thames. His father stayed behind in India and rarely visited. (His younger sister, Avril, was born in 1908. Orwell didn't really know his father until he retired from the service in 1912. And even after that, the pair never formed a strong bond. He found his father to be dull and conservative.
George Orwell's Most Famous Books:
Sometimes called the conscience of a generation, Orwell is best known for two novels: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both books, published toward the end of Orwell's life, have been turned into films and enjoyed tremendous popularity over the years.
'Animal Farm' (1945)
Animal Farm was an anti-Soviet satire in a pastoral setting featuring two pigs as its main protagonists. These pigs were said to represent Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. The novel brought Orwell great acclaim and financial rewards.
'Nineteen Eighty-Four' (1949)
Orwell's masterwork, Nineteen Eighty-Four (or 1984 in later editions), was published in the late stages of his battle with tuberculosis and soon before his death. This bleak vision of the world divided into three oppressive nations stirred up controversy among reviewers, who found this fictional future too despairing. In the novel, Orwell gave readers a glimpse into what would happen if the government controlled every detail of a person's life, down to their own private thoughts.
Klappentext
2021 Facsimile of the 1949 Edition. Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often published as 1984, is Orwell's famed dystopian novel originally published in 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four is concerned with the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of all persons and behaviors within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modeled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated. nNineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It also popularized the term "Orwellian" as an adjective, with many terms used in the novel entering common usage, including "Big Brother", "doublethink", "thoughtcrime", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "2 + 2 = 5", "proles", "Two Minutes Hate", "telescreen", and "Room 101". Time included it on its 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. It was placed on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, reaching No. 13 on the editors' list and No. 6 on the readers' list. In 2003, the novel was listed at No. 8 on The Big Read survey by the BBC. Parallels have been drawn between the novel's subject matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other themes.nReviews:n"Nineteen Eighty-Four is a remarkable book; as a virtuoso literary performance it has a sustained brilliance that has rarely been matched in other works of its genre...It is as timely as the label on a poison bottle." -New York Herald Tribunen n "A profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book...Orwell's theory of power is developed brilliantly." -The New Yorkern n "A book that goes through the reader like an east wind, cracking the skin...Such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing, and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down." -V. S. Pritchettn n "Orwell's novel escorts us so quietly, so directly, and so dramatically from our own day to the fate which may be ours in the future, that the experience is a blood-chilling one." -Saturday Review
