Orwell, George
Orwell, George , the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair ( 1903 – 50 ),who was born in Bengal, brought to England at an early age, and educated at St Cyprian's (of which his account, ‘Such, such were the joys’, was considered too libellous to print in this country until 1968 ) and then at Eton, at both with C. Connolly . His first patriotic poem appeared in a local Henley paper in 1914 . He served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, 1922 – 7 , and his experiences are reflected in his first novel, Burmese Days ( 1934 ); he resigned ‘to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's dominion over man’, as he later put it, and returned to Europe where he worked in Paris and London in a series of ill-paid jobs in a state of ‘fairly severe poverty’ (see Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933 ), struggling with rejection of his work. His second novel, A Clergyman's...
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