George Orwell (1903–1950) Shooting an Elephant LINKS The Political Writings of George Orwell: 1937-1949 http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/ This site was created by Patrick Farley "in hopes of re-introducing Orwell to a wider readership" and "to create a resource for political philosophers of all stripes," and in addition to providing the texts (or exerpts of texts) for many of Orwell's works, it also offers several useful links. George Orwell http://www.levity.com/corduroy/orwell.htm Maintained by Bohemian Ink, this site offers a biographical sketch of Orwell, a bibliography, and several related links. BIOGRAPHY George Orwell (1903–1950)  Born Eric Blair in India, the son of a minor British colonial officer, Orwell was raised in England. His education at good grammar schools, culminating with a stay at Eton, introduced him to what he later called the snobbish world of England's middle and upper classes. Denied a university scholarship, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in 1922 and served in Burma until he resigned in 1927, disgusted with the injustice of British imperialism in India and Burma. He was determined to be a writer and, living at the edge of poverty, deliberately mingled with social outcasts and impoverished laborers. These experiences produced Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Although he was a socialist, his experiences while fighting alongside the leftists during the Spanish Civil War disillusioned him, and he embodied his distaste for any totalitarian system in Animal Farm (1945), a satirical attack on the leadership of the Soviet Union. In his pessimistic novel 1984 (1949), he imagined a social order shaped by a propagandistic perversion of language, in which the government, an extension of "Big Brother," uses two-way television to control the citizenry. Orwell succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of forty-seven, but not before he produced six novels, three documentary works, over seven hundred newspaper articles and reviews, and a volume of essays.