Eric Arthur Blair, best known by his pen name George Orwell,
was an English novelist who wrote two of the most famous novels of the 20th century, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Educated at Eton, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then resigned in 1927 to become a full time writer. In 1928, he moved to Paris where lack of writing success forced him to take menial hotel work, which he described in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London'. (He chose the name George Orwell shortly before its publication, taking his surname from the River Orwell in East Anglia). His powerful dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has sold millions of copies worldwide and its terms such as
"Big Brother", "doublethink" and "newspeak" became part of everyday language.
In 1946 David Astor, editor of the Observer newspaper, lent Orwell a Scottish farmhouse on the remote island of Jura, where Orwell
lived when writing Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Struggling with ill-health, he used a battered
Remington Home Portable typewriter,
often revising and retyping entire chapters . He worked in bed, on what he called "the
grisly job" of typing the manuscript on his "decrepit typewriter",
kept going by chain-smoking ‘roll-up’ cigarettes, endless mugs of black coffee
and strong tea, with only a foul-smelling paraffin heater to keep out the
Scottish chill.
In one of his essays entitled ‘Why I write’ he famously
said, "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout
of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not
driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one
knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention."
As well as his novels, Orwell’s famous six rules for
writing, taken from “Politics and the English Language” have inspired writers
ever since:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
the real writer seems to share throughout the passage of time the exact same struggles that plagued and tormented all writers trying to say something or deliver some message that defied all sense of the level of comfort to which their readers would be reading that very message from inside of. awesome post....long live George Orwell
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