what where some of george orwell's major contributions in the 20th century?

Question

also what were his political views and did anything profound happen in his childhood that made a impact on his future?

basically
what was some interesting stuff about the guy that people dont know?

Answer 1

Aldous Huxley was Orwell's French teacher for a term early in his Eton career.
His first wife, Eileen, was once a student of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Despite being remembered for his radio broadcasts for the BBC during the war, there is no known recording of Orwell speaking. The only known film footage of Orwell is from him at Eton playing the Eton Wall Game.
Orwell had an NKVD file due to his involvement with the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification militia during the Spanish Civil War.
While working on Nineteen Eighty-Four, although suffering from tuberculosis as a result of service in the Spanish Civil War, he regularly used a Royal Enfield 350 motorcycle.
There has been speculation about Orwell's links to the secret services in the UK and some have even gone so far to claim that he was in the employ of MI5. The evidence for this claim is contested.
The George Orwell School was located in the London Borough of Islington

Answer 2

George Orwell's real name was Eric Blair. He went to a fee-paying prep-school which he hated, where he was crammed for the entry exam to England's top private school, Eton. He wrote an essay about it called "Such, Such were the Joys". He won a scholarship to Eton but always felt out-of-place. He spent time as a colonial policeman in Burma which gave him a hatred of colonialism which he saw through and recognised as a form of exploitation.

A particularly clear-minded man, he was a life-long socialist which didn't make him blind to its faults as a philosophy. He served in the Spanish Civil War which ruined his health.

During the war he wrote many essays which are still worth reading today, especially the ones on patriotism and nationalism. There's one in which he diagnoses the ease with which extremists on one side can travel to the opposite end of the political spectrum and become extremists on the other.

Probably his greatest contribution to 20th Century thought is the novel 1984. It is, in effect, a science fiction or at least speculative fiction novel which takes what was known in 1948 about Soviet Russia and other totalitarian states and projects it forward to an imagined Britain in 1984.

Big Brother wasn't always a cheap and nasty TV reality show - in the novel Big Brother is the personification of the state that watches its citizens during every waking hour (remind you of anything?). Newspeak - the way the language is manipulated so that thinking in rebellious ways is literally impossible - look at the way the word "Liberal" is now an insult in the US.

He was born into the middle-class, but although he spent a lot of time with and documenting the lives of the poorest of the poor, quite often you can sense a rather prissy distaste for the poor as people - and hang-over from his upbringing he never entirely shook off.

Answer 3

After serving for five years as a police officer in Burma, Orwell returned to England hoping to be a writer. According to some of his biographies, he was poor then and, for some reasons, he became interested in how the poor lived and worked so he went to Paris, lived and worked there among the poor about a year. Later he returned to London and, again, lived and worked there among the poor. From his direct experiences, he described succinctly and vividly how the poor lived, worked, talked, reacted, thought, etc. which became a fiction (?) entitled "Down and Out in Paris and London" (Gollancz, 1933) and another non-fiction "The Road to Wigan Pier" (Gollancz, 1937). I think these two works, at least, had considerable impacts on his life and on those readership who gradually knew and understood more on the poor in France and the UK.
Moreover, he wrote wonderful essays worth reading and reflecting like "The Politics of Starvation", "The Spike", "Why I Join the I.L.P.", "Looking Back on the Spanish War", "Politics and the English Language", "Why I Write", etc.

Answer 4

Orwell was a writer who wrote through his own experience. His novel Burmese Days exposes the inefficiency and brutality of The Indian Imperial Police in which he spent his early days. Appalled by the injustice of British rule in the Far East, Orwell resigned and lived as an outcast in France and in the Kent hop-fields from where he acquired the material for Down and Out in Paris and London.

Orwell moved on to live in a mining community in the North, during the Depression and recounted his experiences in The Road To Wigan Pier. This novel was Orwell’s first socialist work. He used his experience of the suffering of the mining families to appeal for social change.

Orwell’s later employment as a bookseller’s assistant gave him the material for Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a satirical novel lampooning the Middle Class and it’s pretentious conventions.

During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell fought on the Republican side and wrote Homage To Calalonia out of his experience. He was injured in the conflict and was unable to serve in the fight against Fascism in the Second World War. At this time, reports of Stalin’s tyranny in the Soviet Union led to Orwell’s disillusionment with Socialism.

It was then that Orwell started to write from his imagination. Animal Farm satirised the Russian Revolution and the record of the Soviet state.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1948, predicted the totalitarian state that Britain would become if subjected to Socialism. Many of his neologisms ‘newspeak’, ‘big brother’ ‘doublethink’ became bywords for political manipulation.

Orwell’s name was not if fact George Orwell! In order to work undercover as an opponent of the class system, he took the name of the river Orwell as pseudonym. His real name was Eric Blair. So Eric was eradicated and George was germinated. Blair was abandoned as bad and Orwell was all well with the world.

Answer 5

All I know is Animal Farm and 1984. I only read 1984 in high school and it's one of the few books that I will never forget.