George Orwell, the pen-name1 of Eric Arthur Blair, was born on 25th June 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant2. The following year, Eric Arthur was taken to England and brought up almost exclusively by his mother. He was a studious child and won a King’s Scholarship3 to Eton College in 1917.
In 1921, he passed the entrance examination of the Indian Imperial Police and was accepted into its Burma (present Myanmar) division. We have practically no information about his five-year experience in Burma; however, we know that it offered the material for two of his best-known essays4, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and his first novel Burmese Days (1934). He left the job in 1927 and decided to become a writer.
In 1928, he moved to Paris where the lack of success as a writer forced him into a series of low jobs. He described his experiences in Down and Out in Paris and London, a book of memories published in 1933. He took the name George Orwell, which combined the name of the reigning monarch (George V) with a river flowing through the county of Suffolk in England.
The following years were an important period in Orwell’s life: in 1935, he completed a second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, while working in a bookshop in London. Here he met his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and wrote a third novel, partly based on his bookselling experience, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).