George, real name Eric Arthur Blair. 1903–50, English novelist and essayist, born in India. He is notable for his social criticism, as in The Road to Wigan Pier (1932); his account of his experiences of the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia (1938); and his satirical novels Animal Farm (1945), an allegory on the Russian Revolution, and 1984 (1949), in which he depicts an authoritarian state of the future