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George Orwell was born Eric Blair in 1903 into an upper middle-class English family which had a tradition of government administration in the British Empire. He was in fact born in India, where his father was then working. He was sent to Eton, one of the most expensive boys' schools in Britain and one of those with most prestige, but instead of going on to university he followed the family tradition by joining the Indian Police Service and was sent to Burma. His five years there led him to reject every aspect of imperialism and the brutality it could create in those in authority, and to feel closer to those who were oppressed than to those who oppressed them.
A similar sympathy and identification with those at the bottom of a social system led him, on his return to Europe, to travel around Britain and France, living on the road among the poorest groups of society and entering as completely as he could into their way of life. It is true, of course, that he knew that because of his family background he, unlike them, could return to a different way of life when he wanted. He wrote about these experiences under the name of George Orwell, partly to protect his family from embarrassment and partly because he had never liked his own name very much.
In the next few years he worked briefly as a teacher in private schools and in a bookshop, but his most important activity at this time was his writing: novels, descriptions of his time in Burma and among the poor of London and Paris, and book reviews. In 1937 he went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republic, with the force from the United Marxist Workers' Party (POUM), until he was badly wounded in the neck and returned to England. By this time his writing had made him well known in left-wing circles; he wrote as a socialist who was aware of some of the shortcomings of socialism and of the way that ordinary people, who should have been drawn towards socialism, were being turned away from it by the arguments and actions of some of the intellectual socialists.
During World War II Orwell worked for the BBC producing programmes for India and South East Asia, and as manager of a bookshop, as well as producing a lot of journalism. This was mainly on political subjects, but he also wrote articles about everyday wartime life in London and a considerable amount of literary criticism. During this time he began to plan Nineteen Eighty-Four , before he started to work on Animal Farm, which was published in 1945.
Orwell's wife died while in hospital for a relatively minor operation before Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, so that she never saw the success and scandal it created. There is a strong suggestion that earlier medical attention could have given her a chance of a longer life, but that concern over money meant that she did not consult a doctor in good time. Orwell equally neglected his own health, working on articles and reviews through attacks of illness and refusing to see a doctor. He had written an outline of the plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1943. By the time he came to write the first version of the novel, in 1947, neither world history nor the events of his personal life had made him any more hopeful about the future. He collapsed into bed for a month after writing this first version until, after finally consulting a doctor, he was sent to a sanatorium where his tuberculosis could be treated. As soon as he started to feel well, he began to write again, with a pen because the doctors had taken away his typewriter.
He worked on alterations to Nineteen Eighty-Four in the sanatorium, and as soon as he was able to leave, he got to work on the second version of the novel, although he was still so weak that he had to spend half the day in bed. This final version was produced in 1948, and the year in which he set the novel was obtained by reversing the last two digits. The effort of typing the final version brought him near to physical collapse, and he had to enter a sanatorium again.
Orwell hoped that if he was willing to lead the life of an invalid there was some hope for him, and he planned to marry again and to go to Switzerland for his health. He did get married (in a hospital bed, too ill to go to a registry office), but Switzerland remained a dream; on 21st January 1949 his lung collapsed and he died, at once and alone.