Eric arthur blair

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism. Considered perhaps the twentieth century's best chroniclerof English culture, Orwell wrote fiction, polemical journalism, literary criticism and poetry. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945)—they have together sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author. His 1938 book Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences as a volunteer onthe Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture, are widely acclaimed. Orwell's influence on contemporary culture, popular and political, continues decades after his death. Several of his neologisms, along with the term "Orwellian"—now a byword for any totalitarian or manipulative social phenomenon opposed to a freesociety—have entered the vernacular. Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, Bihar, in India. His great-grandfather Charles Blair had been a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who had married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of slave plantations in Jamaica. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was aclergyman. Although the gentility was passed down the generations, the prosperity was not; Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class". His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma where her French father was involved in speculative ventures. Eric had twosisters: Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one year old, his mother took him to England. In 1904, Blair's mother settled at Henley-on-Thames. Thereafter, Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit, in the summer of 1907, he did not see his father again until 1912. His mother's diary from 1905 indicates a lively roundof social activity and artistic interests. The family moved to Shiplake before the First World War, and Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially Jacintha Buddicom. When they first met, he was standing on his head in a field, and on being asked why, he said, "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up." Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry anddreamed of becoming famous writers. He told her that he might write a book in similar style to that of H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. During this period, he enjoyed shooting, fishing and birdwatching with Jacintha's brother and sister. At the age of five, Eric Blair was sent as a day-boy to the convent school in Henley-on-Thames which Marjorie attended (a Roman Catholic convent run by FrenchUrsulines, exiled from France after religious education was banned there in 1903). His mother wanted him to have a public school education, but his family was not wealthy enough to afford the fees, making it necessary for him to obtain a scholarship. Ida Blair's brother Charles Limouzin, who lived on the South Coast of England, was asked to find the best possible school to prepare Eric[15] for publicschool entrance, and he recommended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, East Sussex.[8] Limouzin, who was a proficient golfer, came into contact with the school and its headmaster at the Royal Eastbourne Golf Club where he won several competitions in 1903 and 1904.[16] The headmaster undertook to help Blair to win the scholarship, and made a private financial arrangement which allowed Blair's parents...