George Orwell Research Paper

George Orwell, who was he really? Some say he was the greatest English novelist of the 1900’s (Britannica), while others say he was just someone who had a way with words and voicing his opinion (Biography.com). In reality, George Rowell was no one. He did not exist and was just a figment of everyone’s imagination. George Orwell was really Eric Arthur Blair. The son of Ida Mabel Limouzin and minor British official Richard Walmsley Blair. Orwell was born June 25, 1903 in what was, at the time, Motihari, Bengal, India (Britannica) which is now Motihari, Bihar, India. Here Orwell was born into a class of sahibs, as he stayed for eight years (Britannica). Oddly, his first word was said to be “beastly” (Biography.com), but the only clue as to why

He coped with this through his love for writing. When Orwell was only four years old, he began writing his first poems. When he was older, he said, “I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think that from the very start of my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.” (Biography.com) Once Orwell reached the age of eight, he was sent to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast (Britannica) where he quickly realized that the rich were treated better than the poor (Biography.com). Orwell was quickly distinguished from the other boys by his being very poor and very bright. The boy grew up ill-tempered and withdrawn, but told of those times as misery in one of his essays (Britannica). He made it through these times by reading large books from known authors such as Rudyard Kipling and

There he resigned from the force and felt as though he should do something to shape his character. He immersed himself into the poor lives of the undesirables in England. Dressed in rags, Orwell moved to the east end of London and lived with beggars. In Paris, he spent most of the time working as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants, also joining the others in their annual work in Kentish hop fields. All of this hardship gave him the material he needed to be able to write his first major work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). In this book he summarized what happened to him and molded it into something resembling fiction. This remained his style for most of his life (Britannica). In order to not embarrass his family name, Eric Arthur Blair published his books under the pseudonym George Orwell (Biography.com). This book was good enough to land him some initial literary recognition and paved the way for his next books Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Britannica). In the middle of all of this Orwell met the love of his life, though not the only one, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. The two married June 1936, but were said to have an open marriage