George Orwell was born Eric Blair on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, Bihar, in India. Shortly after his birth, he was taken by his mother back to Oxfordshire, England. His family were financially poor, but an aspiring middle-class family. Orwell described it as ‘lower upper middle class’ – a reflection of the importance he felt the English attached to class labels. George Orwell has proved to be one of the twentieth century’s most influential and thought-provoking writers. His relatively small numbers of books have created intense literary and political criticism. Orwell was a socialist, but at the same time, he did not fit into any neat ideology. He is best known for his novels “1984” and “Animal Farm” – which both warn about the dangers of a totalitarian state. Completed just after the Second World War, they touched a chord because of contemporary fears over the growing influence of state control. He was foremost a political writer, but for Orwell, his object was not to promote a certain point of view but to arrive at the truth; exposing the hypocrisy and injustice prevalent in society.
