For over five years Eric Arthur Blair worked as an imperial policeman in Burma, having taken the job after graduating from Eton College with grades that weren’t good enough to earn a university scholarship and parents who could not afford to send him without one. But in 1927, after about with dengue fever, Blair decided to change careers. He returned to England at age 24, determined to become a writer—a choice for which humanity should be very grateful.
Blair worked odd jobs in England and Paris, and had some success as a journalist, while attempting to write novels and poetry. In June 1936 he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy and the following year they went to Spain, to join the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Blair narrowly escaped being killed. Shot in the throat by a sniper, he was discharged as medically unfit for service.
Back in England, Blair wrote Homage to Catalonia, recounting his experiences in Spain. Concerned that the book would embarrass his family, he chose to publish it under a pen name—George Orwell.
The book was a commercial failure, but Orwell’s reputation as a journalist and essayist began to grow. His wound rendered him unfit to serve in World War II so he devoted himself to his writing, while working for a while as a radio broadcaster for the BBC. In 1944 and Eileen adopted a son they named Richard (she being unable to have children). Tragically, Eileen died in March 1945, of a post-operative infection following a hysterectomy, when Richard was only 9 months old.
By then Orwell had become well known and well regarded as a journalist and essayist, but he had not had much success as a novelist, having published four, all to mediocre sales and weak reviews.
In 1943 Orwell had finished a novel he titled Animal Farm. But because the book was easily recognizable as an attack on Stalinist Russia, which was at that time an important ally in the war, publishers initially declined it. Eventually published in August 1945, Animal Farm became an immediate success.
He followed it in 1949 with his best-known work, the brilliantly disturbing novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote while living with his young son Richard in a farmhouse on an isolated Scottish island.
In October 1949, while hospitalized with tuberculosis and in declining health, Orwell married Sonia Brownell. A little over 3 months later, he died at age 46.