bees - caribou







                                      

                                                   June  25  : )



It's the birthday of the novelist and essayist George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal, India (1903). He came from a middle class family, but managed to win a scholarship to a distinguished boarding school, where most of his classmates were upper class kids. He did not fit in at all. He said, "In a world where the prime necessities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes, neatly brushed hair, a charming smile, I was no good."

So after school he decided to get as far away from England as possible. He went to live in the English colony of Burma, where he took a job as a member of the Imperial Police. He quit after five years because, he said, "I could not go on any longer serving an imperialism which I had come to regard as very largely a racket."

So he returned to London and decided to become a writer, even though he'd never shown much interest in writing before. He wanted to write about the poor and homeless, so went undercover as a street person, wearing ragged old clothes and living in the slums of East London and Paris, working as a dishwasher. The result was his first book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). He later told an interviewer that he had chosen to live with the poor in order to get over his guilt at having been part of the British Imperial Police. He said, "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."

Orwell went on to write several novels, but he supported himself largely as a journalist, publishing about four newspaper articles a week, averaging about 200 a year. He considered himself basically a socialist, and much of what he wrote was political commentary. And then he had a life changing experience when he went to cover the Spanish Civil War. In Barcelona, he got to see a communist utopia at work, and he was amazed. He said, "Many of the normal motives of civilized life snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. had simply ceased to exist. ... I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for." But in a very short time, the Stalinists began to suppress the other leftist groups, arresting them and censoring newspapers and organizing armed militias.

The experience persuaded him that it wasn't Fascism or Communism that was evil, but simply idealism taken to any extreme. And as World War II broke out, he began to worry that idealism was about to conquer Europe and stamp out any kind of freedom. He was so pessimistic about the future of the world that he found it impossible to write fiction. He took a job with the BBC, and got a chance to witness how governments on all sides of the war were using propaganda to rewrite the history what was happening. So in 1943, Orwell resigned his position at the BBC. He had wanted for years to write a book about his idea that utopias so easily turn into nightmares, so he finally did.

The book was onl　　　y about 100 pages long, and most of the main characters were talking animals. When he submitted it to publishers in London, they all turned him down. Orwell considered publishing the book himself as a pamphlet, but finally a small publisher picked it up, and when Animal Farm came out in 1945, the book made Orwell famous.

Orwell spent the last years of his life suffering from TB and writing 1984 (1949), about a future in which England has become a totalitarian state run by an anonymous presence known onl　　　y as Big Brother. It has since been translated into sixty-two languages and has sold tens of millions of copies. Today, critics have estimated that every year one　　　 million people read George Orwell for the first time.