(pen name of Eric Blair). Born June 25, 1903, at Motihari in Bengal, India; died Jan. 21, 1950, in London. English writer and publicist.

The son of a British colonial official, Orwell graduated from Eton College in 1921. After serving with the British police in Burma, he returned to Europe in 1927. For several years he lived in poverty in London and Paris and established close ties with petit bourgeois radicals. He fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 in the ranks of the POUM, an anarchist organization. He was seriously wounded and, disillusioned with revolutionary ideals, became a bourgeois liberal reformist and anticommunist. During World War II he served in the English home guard and was a commentator for the BBC and a correspondent for the newspaper the Observer.

As a writer, Orwell was greatly influenced by Jonathan Swift, Samuel Butler, Jack London, D. H. Lawrence, and E. I. Zamiatin. He first gained fame with his writings about the life of British miners in impoverished areas, his reminiscences of the war in Spain, and his literary criticism and publicistic works. However, his literary and political reputation rests almost entirely on his satire Animal Farm (1945), which advocates the pointlessness of revolutionary struggle, and his antiutopian novel 1984 (1949), in which he depicts the society that would replace capitalism and bourgeois democracy. This future society, according to Orwell, is a totalitarian hierarchical structure, based on sophisticated techniques for enslaving the masses physically and psychologically and on total scorn for the freedom and dignity of the individual. It is a society of material deprivation and universal fear and hatred.

From the standpoint of subjective idealism, Orwell examines the problems of freedom and necessity and of the truth value of knowledge. On this basis, he attempts to justify voluntarism in politics. His warnings against certain dangerous social trends and his protests against the suppression of individual freedom are intermixed with homilies on the uselessness of struggling for a better future. This attitude enabled the ideologists of reaction to make use of Orwell’s work to carry on an extensive anticommunist propaganda campaign, utilizing to this end millions of copies of his writings in many different languages and numerous radio and television broadcasts and motion pictures.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s there has been an increased interest in the West in Orwell’s ideological heritage. An intense struggle has been waged over his legacy between reactionary, ultra-right forces and petit bourgeois radicals, who view Orwell as a predecessor of the New Left and believe that many trends in modern Western society are epitomized in the Orwellian vision of 1984.