Death of George Orwell

George Orwell died on 21 January 1950 in London, aged 46. An English writer and journalist, Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair, educated at Eton, and served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma before deciding to become a writer. He described life among the poor in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, and fought on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, an experience recorded in Homage to Catalonia. His satirical fable Animal Farm of 1945 and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four of 1949 criticised totalitarianism and gave the language terms such as Big Brother and Newspeak. He also wrote influential essays, and died of tuberculosis.

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