Animal Farm, George Orwell

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) was born on June in 1903 in India, where is father worked for the Civil Service.The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian imperial police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel Burmese Days 1934.

Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals.

Down and out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire and The Road to Wigan pier 1937 is a powerful description of the property he saw there.

At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republican and was injured in the throat. Hommage to Catalonia is his account of the Civil War.

He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit.He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up For Air. During the second world war he served in the home guard and he worked for the BBC Eastern service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary and also wrote for the Observer and later Manchester evening news. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945 and in 1995 received W. H. Smith and penguin books Great read of the century award. This novel together with Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) brought Orwell worldwide fame.

George died in London in January 1950 a few days before Desmond MacCarthy had sent him a message of greeting in which he wrote « you have made an indelible mark in English literature you are among the few memorable writers of your generation »

He was an English author well known for his commitment against social injustice

The story takes place on a farm in England. The animals of the Manor's farm, exploited by men, decide to revolt following the speech of the pig Sage the Elder, dean of the exploitation. After his death, the pigs Napoleon and Snowball led the revolt and hunted the farmers.

They then organize a farm managed by the animals themselves. Then, the intellectual Snowball ends up being chased by his rival Napoleon, who makes him a traitor, and leads the farm with an iron fist.

Finally, life for animals is even harder than in human time; the novel also ends with the following observation: it has become impossible to distinguish pigs from men. The rules of equality decreed at the start of the uprising remain only this last command: "All animals are equal, but some are more so than others."

QUOTES

Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers

Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

...