1984 - Om Books

There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being or it loses its own self- confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factors is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

Eric Arthus Blair, (George Orwell), was born in 1903 Motihari, a British colony of India. He accompanied his mother to England at the age of one. He studied at St Cyprian's School, in Eastbourne, Sussex before earning scholarships to Wellington and Eton colleges. At Eton, he was a King's Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Thereafter, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922. He returned to England in 1928 and wrote of his hatred of imperialism in Burmese Days. In 1933, he adopted Bengal, his pen name, George Orwell while writing for the New Adelphi Orwell lived for several years in poverty, as he recalled in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). He eventually worked as a schoolteacher and a part-time assistant in a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, an experience recounted in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell fought for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalist uprising. Homage to Catalonia is Orwell's account of the civil war Orwell was shot in the neck on May 20, 1937, an experience he described in his short essay Wounded by a Fascist Sniper, as well as in Homage to Catalonia, and returned to England in 1938. Until 1940, Orwell wrote book reviews for the New English Weekly. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began working for the BBC Eastern Service. He resigned in 1943 to become literary editor of Tribune, in which he contributed a regular column entitled As I Please In 1945, Orwell's anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm was published to great critical acclaim. From 1945, Orwell was the Observers var correspondent and later contributed regularly to the Manchester Evening News. In 1949, his best-known work, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. Orwell's writings straddled several genres: fiction, polemical journalism, literary criticism and poetry, essays on politics, literature, language and culture. Several of his neologisms are part of our everyday vocabulary today For the last three years of his life, Orwell was in and out of hospitals. He Died om 21st January, 1950 at the age of 46 from tuberculosis.