Essayist, novelist, journalist, and critic, George Orwell is one of the most influential and widely-read figures in English literature. He was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, British India. Orwell’s father was a low-level colonial official supervising the production of opium for export to China; his mother grew up in Burma (modern Myanmar), where her French father was a teakwood merchant. Orwell described his family as “lower-upper-middle class”—possessed of all the English elite’s cultural pretensions, but lacking their money. When he was just a year old, his mother took him and his older sister to Oxfordshire, England, where they lived first in the town of Henley-on-Thames and later in the nearby village of Shiplake. The rustic, traditional environs of Orwell’s childhood informed his later ideals for England and its society: the Thames Valley acted as the setting of his novel Coming Up For Air, which extolled the dignity of old-time, pre-WWI England.

Even as a boy, Orwell had literary aspirations. He composed poems and read often; his childhood friend Jacinda Buddicom remembered him saying that he might one day write a book in the vein of H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia. Of his chief literary inspirations, Orwell later wrote that “the modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.” In September of 1911, Orwell left his family to board at St. Cyprian’s School, in Eastbourne, Sussex, which he described as “an expensive and snobbish” place “in process of becoming more snobbish, and, I imagine, more expensive.” He recounted his time there in the sardonically-titled essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” (published posthumously in 1953), which portrays a grotesquely filthy, violent, traumatizing environment ruled by sadistic adults who surveil their pupils and manipulate them into self-loathing and submission. “The great, abiding lesson of my boyhood,” wrote Orwell, was “…that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good.” The essay displays clear thematic ties to his two most famous novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.

In spite of his professed hatred of St. Cyprian’s, Orwell excelled academically. Two poems he wrote there were published in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, and he won secondary-school scholarships to the elite institutions of Wellington and Eton. After a brief stint at the former, he attended Eton as a King’s Scholar, arriving in May of 1917. Orwell apparently gave little heed to his studies there, although he took a keen interest in student journalism, helping to produce a magazine, The Election Times, as well as two other publications, Bubble and Squeak and College Days. At Eton, his primary tutor was the classicist A.S.F. Gow, with whom he stayed in touch for the rest of his life. In 1921, having failed to win a scholarship to either Oxford or Cambridge, the 18-year-old Orwell decided to join the Imperial Police. He requested and was granted a post in Burma.

Orwell spent five years in Burma. His experiences there provided the material for two of his most famous essays, “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) and “A Hanging” (1931), as well as the novel Burmese Days (1934). He arrived in 1922, and, starting in 1924, was assigned to a number of remote outposts on the colony’s frontier. By the end of the year, however, he was sent to Syriam (Thanlyin), a town near the capital of Rangoon (Yangon), which he visited as frequently as possible, fleeing his professional obligations and absorbing the city’s culture. Orwell quickly deviated from conventional behavior among the colonials: he developed fluency in Burmese and visited ethnic Karen churches, conversing with the priests; he had his knuckles tattooed in the native style (said to grant protection); and he became something of a loner among the English. In 1926, he transferred to Moulmein (Mawlamyine), the setting of “Shooting an Elephant.” In that essay, Orwell describes how his duties as a colonial policeman had forced him to “see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.” “I hated [my job],” he wrote, “more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear.” His time in Burma—as both an observer and footsoldier of the British regime—made him a lifelong anti-imperialist. By the time of his arrival in Moulmein, he “had already made up [his] mind that imperialism was an evil thing…I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British.” In 1927, Orwell contracted dengue fever and was allowed to return to England on medical leave; soon after arriving, he resigned from the Imperial Police.

The next five years of his life, according to Orwell, were in large part a reaction to his time in Burma. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote: “I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate…I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.” Upon returning to England, Orwell found residence in London with help from poet and family friend Ruth Pitter. Dressing in ragged clothes and masquerading under the name P.S. Burton, he ventured into the city’s destitute East End, where he mingled with beggars and working-class laborers and spent nights in cheap boarding houses (“kips” or “doss-houses”) and workhouse lodgings (“spikes”). He was an admirer of Jack London, who had himself written a firsthand account of the life of the city’s poor, The People of the Abyss, after spending the summer of 1902 in the East End. In early 1928, Orwell moved to Paris’s then blue-collar Fifth Arrondissement to work as a journalist and tutor. He published his first article, criticizing English laws censoring fiction, in the literary-political journal Monde, operated by the French novelist and communist Henri Barbusse. Orwell also wrote articles about the destitute and unemployed for the socialist magazine Le Progrès Civique, and his first English-language article appeared around the same time in G.K.’s Weekly.

In 1929, Orwell experienced a spate of bad luck. At the beginning of the year he became extremely ill and was brought to the Hôpital Cochin, a free hospital where young doctors were trained. It served the most impoverished Parisians, and its conditions were horrific; Orwell’s time there provided the material for his 1946 essay “How the Poor Die.” Shortly after he was discharged his lodgings were robbed, leaving him penniless. Unable to sustain himself on journalism alone, Orwell took whatever jobs he could find, including as a hotel restaurant’s dishwasher. At the end of 1929, he returned to England and moved in with his parents at their home in Southwold. From there, Orwell continued to embark on his “tramping” expeditions as P.S. Burton. He joined the poor of London in traveling to Kent to work in the hopfields, and in 1932 he intentionally had himself arrested, writing up an account of his jail time in the essay “Clink.” The year before, he had published his first English essay, “The Spike,” in John Middleton Murry’s magazine New Adelphi, to which Orwell contributed frequently throughout the thirties.

By 1932 he had written the first version of what would become his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, a memoir of his years traversing the underbelly of French and English society. Orwell struggled to find a publisher until his friend and patron Mabel Fierz introduced him to Victor Gollancz, who had just established a publishing house specializing in left-wing and socialist writing. Gollancz published Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933; it was the first work that Eric Arthur Blair wrote under the pen name George Orwell—in his estimation, a “good round English name,” which he derived from East Anglia’s River Orwell.

In 1934, Orwell published his first novel, Burmese Days. During this time he had been working in London as a teacher, but after a severe bout of pneumonia he returned to Southwold, where he wrote his next novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, drawing on his work in the Kentish hopfields. After recuperating, Orwell returned to London to work part-time at Booklovers’ Corner, a job that provided the basis for his 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Around this time, Gollancz approached Orwell with the idea to write a book illuminating the deprived conditions of northern England. Orwell embarked on a trip throughout the north, researching for what became The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 for the Left Book Club.

The Road to Wigan Pier was Orwell’s first major work dealing explicitly with political theory. It begins with a study of the lives of indigent and unemployed coal miners; the second half consists of both an appeal to socialism and a lengthy critique of contemporary socialist movements. By this point, Orwell was describing himself as a “Tory-anarchist,” although his political ideology had not yet fully matured. Since his return from Burma, he had involved himself with left-wing, socialist circles, but made no party commitment. On his northern trip, he observed rallies held by the fascist Oswald Mosley (“his speech was the usual claptrap…The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews”) and sat in at British Communist Party meetings—which prompted government intelligence to surveil Orwell for the next 12 years.

Orwell’s experience of the Spanish Civil War developed and crystallized his political beliefs. In 1937, he traveled to Spain with his wife, Eileen (whom he had married in 1935), to fight on the Republican side against Franco’s fascist army. Arriving in Barcelona, he joined the socialist P.O.U.M. militia, linked to Britain’s Independent Labour Party. He fought on the Aragon front and achieved the rank of second lieutenant, but on May 20, in the town of Teruel, a fascist sniper shot Orwell through the neck. “By some sort of unexplainable luck,” as his battalion commander put it in a letter to Eileen’s brother, the sniper’s bullet missed any vital organs (although Orwell’s speaking voice was permanently damaged). Meanwhile in Barcelona, Soviet-backed communists—in an attempt to repress political rivals—had outlawed the P.O.U.M., and were rounding up and incarcerating its members. In Homage to Catalonia, which detailed his six months in Spain, Orwell described “the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues and prowling gangs of armed men.” He and Eileen fled back to England in secret, while in Valencia they were charged and convicted, in their absence, by the Spanish-communist Tribunal of Espionage and High Treason.

As regards his political thinking, there were two major consequences of Orwell’s time in Spain. First, after years of dancing around its fringes, he finally embraced socialism. Upon arriving back in England, Orwell registered to join the socialist Independent Labour Party; as he wrote in a letter to Cyril Connolly, an old friend from St. Cyprian’s, “I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.” In the 1945 essay “Why I Write,” Orwell explained that “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it.” He delineated his political ideas in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941). “England,” he wrote, “is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.” In alternative, Orwell proposed a decentralized socialist state and a “classless, ownerless” society, created in a revolution emanating from the common folk upwards.

The second key consequence of his participation in the Spanish Civil War was an ensuing hatred and fear of Soviet communism, specifically Stalinism—the direct result of his experience witnessing the suppression of the P.O.U.M. in communist Barcelona. Of the British-Soviet alliance entering WWII, Orwell wrote that “one could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten.” In 1949, he provided his friend Celia Kerwin, who worked for the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office, with a list of “crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or [others] inclined that way,” which included the novelists Guy Aldred and Arthur Calder-Marshall, as well as the actor Charlie Chaplin. Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm was the ultimate realization of his anti-Stalinist views: its plot is largely accepted as an allegory for the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalin’s subsequent exercise of totalitarian control over the new Soviet state.

Orwell published Homage to Catalonia in 1938. The same year, he suffered a near-fatal lung hemorrhage, and decamped to Morocco to recover. There he wrote the novel Coming Up For Air, which reflects his idealization of rural, austere, traditional English lifestyle. Indeed, despite his far-left politics, in many of his views on contemporary society Orwell took an essentially conservative, near-puritanical line. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he comes off as almost a luddite: “in a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.”

Orwell’s attitudes made him hard to classify, a difficulty compounded by his eccentric personality, full of seeming contradictions. He maintained, to an extent, the solitary streak he had developed in Burma for the rest of his life; his tall, gaunt, gangly appearance and apparent clumsiness sometimes made him an object of amusement to peers; and yet he could also be, in the words of Fierz, “something of a womaniser.” He was exceedingly polite, but possessed a violent streak: once, when his roommate came home late, loud and drunk, he beat him severely with a walking stick. His marriage was marred by infidelity and frustration, and yet, as he wrote to a friend, “…it was a real marriage, in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work.” Orwell had nursed literary aspirations since childhood and made a career out of letters, but in an approving discussion of working-class sensibilities, he claimed that “where ‘education’ touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy instinct…[The working man] wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography.” And some of his writing, which so often championed disadvantaged and marginalized groups, is sprinkled with homophobic epithets directed at those he sought to ridicule.

In 1940, Orwell began writing for socialist newspaper The Tribune, where he was eventually appointed literary editor. The same year, Connolly founded Horizon, to which Orwell contributed a number of pieces, including his famous essay Politics and the English Language (1946). In 1942, he began a long and productive relationship with The Observer, edited by close confidant and patron David Astor (who was best man at his 1949 wedding to Sonia Brownell). As he continued to publish essays, criticism, and reviews, Orwell came to be recognized as an important voice on the left, and was a principal member of the so-called Shanghai Club of left-wing writers and journalists. Initially opposed to British involvement in WWII, Orwell changed his mind after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. “We are in a strange period of history” he wrote in The Tribune, “in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.” Denied entry into the military due to his poor health, he joined the Home Guard, worked part-time in a factory, and, in 1941, took a position in the B.B.C.’s Eastern Service. In his duties producing propaganda for the British Raj, Orwell collaborated with literary luminaries including T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and Dylan Thomas, and successfully lobbied to secure a job in his department for the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand. In 1945, with allied victory imminent, Orwell traveled to Europe and reported from free Paris and the captured regions of Germany.

Orwell left the B.B.C. in 1943 and began work on Animal Farm, published two years later. It was an immediate success, propelling him to international fame and delivering him, for the first time in his career, relative financial security. Now a literary celebrity, he was swamped with work: “Smothered under journalism,” he wrote to a friend, “I have become more and more like a sucked orange.” In a letter to Arthur Koestler, Orwell expressed a wish only “to be free of it all and have time to think again.” Adding to the strain was the destruction of his home by a German V-1 rocket, and then the sudden death of Eileen, who experienced heart failure while under anesthesia for a minor surgery, leaving Orwell to raise their adopted son alone. Astor offered Orwell his remote country home on the Hebridean isle of Jura, in Scotland, and Orwell readily accepted. With his son and his sister Avril, he moved to Jura in 1946, and began work on Nineteen Eighty-four. (The idea for the project derived from the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 novel We, which provided the model for Orwell’s characters and plot.)

Over the following years his health, always precarious, began to decline precipitously. At the end of 1947, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Nevertheless, Orwell pushed himself to complete the manuscript for Nineteen Eighty-four, often neglecting his health in the process: “like a fool,” he wrote to Astor, “I decided not to go to a doctor—I wanted to get on with the book I was writing.” By the time he was composing the final typescript, racing to complete it under pressure from his agent and publishers, Orwell could barely walk and was working entirely from his bed. At the end of 1948, his publishers received a package from Jura, which contained what he described to Astor as “this bloody book about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn’t conclusive.” Orwell was only modestly content with the end result: “I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied…I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB.” His publishers, however, were immediately aware of the novel’s importance (an internal memo declared that “if we can’t sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot”). In fact, Nineteen Eighty-four proved to be Orwell’s most famous work, and one of the definitive novels of the modern era. It spawned the term “Orwellian”—now used to describe, according to the Oxford dictionary, “a political system in which a government tries to have complete control over people’s behavior and thoughts”—as well as a number of other now-common phrases and words, including “Big Brother,” “newspeak,” “Thought Police,” and “doublethink.” Secker and Warburg published the novel in 1949; the next year, Orwell died in London.

From the beginning of his career, Orwell wrote with purpose. It was not easy for him—“writing a book,” he once said, “is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness”—but he felt an irrepressible duty to do it. Through his work, as the scholar Richard Hoggart put it, Orwell acted as a “public conscience.” All of his writing derived from an intense, tireless examination of the society, politics, and culture of his day. Connolly once remarked that Orwell “could not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.” Behind every novel, every essay, was “some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention.” “My starting point,” he wrote, “is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.”

Orwell was, in many respects, the Vincent Van Gogh of British letters: a visionary artist who died penniless, and whose contribution to our understanding of human desires, needs, proclivities, and demons, continues to resonate all the more loudly in the decades after his passing.