Summary
Highlights
George Orwell, who died in 1950, was an English intellectual who used literature to change the world for the better. He was a political writer aiming to foster kindness, fairness, and wisdom through art. In his 1946 essay, 'Why I Write,' he stated his goal was to make political writing an art, driven by a feeling of partisanship and injustice to expose lies and draw attention to facts.
To understand Orwell, one must understand his likes and dislikes. He famously disliked intellectuals, despite being one himself, accusing them of lacking patriotism, resenting money, being physically weak, and harboring pretension and dishonesty. Born in India in 1903 to economically fragile civil servant parents, he had a privileged but challenging upbringing, attending prep school and Eton, but rejecting the values of the English public school system. He never went to university, serving as an imperial policeman before becoming a literary intellectual.
Orwell's generation of intellectuals were often drawn to abstract schemes like communism or capitalism. Orwell, however, came to champion the 'ordinary person' and their tastes, opinions, and needs. Despite his aloof upbringing, he sought to understand and defend common life – people working ordinary jobs, often without much education or material wealth, who nonetheless love, care for others, work, have fun, and contemplate life's deepest questions. He documented these experiences in 'Down and Out in Paris and London' (1933) and 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937).
Orwell admired the lack of prudishness and hypocrisy among ordinary people, noting their habits of gambling, drinking, and using foul language. He believed that news often abstracted people, and his role as a literary journalist was to flesh out the human beings behind statistics, correcting prejudice and racism. He satirized neo-colonial attitudes towards indigenous populations, highlighting how those who work with their hands are often invisible. This love for the ordinary extended to his appreciation for previously unconsidered literary themes like comics, country walks, dancing, flowers, English cooking, and Charles Dickens.
In his renowned 1946 essay, 'Politics and the English Language,' Orwell argued against the pretentious, verbose prose of intellectuals. He championed a simple, clear style of writing, outlining rules that included banning fancy words and foreign phrases. He believed clear language was essential for exposing lies and conveying truth effectively.
Orwell is most famous for 'Animal Farm' (1945) and 'Nineteen Eighty-four' (1949), written in the final years of his life. He believed serious ideas should achieve mass popularity, requiring skill and intelligence. 'Animal Farm' is a political fable about revolutions betraying their initial ideals, understood by a mass audience through its allegorical use of animals. 'Nineteen Eighty-four' reinvented the science fiction novel, warning against alarming societal trends, such as government control through sophisticated entertainment and empty news, disguised as freedom, and the manipulation of information to blind citizens to their enslavement.
Orwell's wisdom lay in his focus on the truth of ordinary life – sex, food, money, love, and pleasure – and his clear writing about enduring human nature. He remains one of the most successful serious English-language writers of the 20th century. His ultimate message, echoing Charles Dickens, was a plea for human beings to behave better, a seemingly simple instruction he considered profoundly important.