Eric Blair, who published as George Orwell — English essayist, journalist, and novelist, and the central English-language political writer of the 20th century. Born in colonial Bengal in 1903, educated at Eton on a scholarship he spent his life ambivalent about, Orwell served as an imperial policeman in Burma for five years (Burmese Days, 1934), lived deliberately among the poor in Paris and London (Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933), reported on the industrial north of England for the Left Book Club (The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937), and fought with the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, where he was shot through the throat and watched the Soviet-directed suppression of his own side at close range (Homage to Catalonia, 1938) — an experience that made him permanently anti-Stalinist from inside the democratic-socialist left. He died of tuberculosis at 46, a year after 1984's publication.
His two political fables — Animal Farm (1945), the allegory of the Russian Revolution as barnyard takeover, and 1984 (1949), the dystopia of Oceania with its telescreens, its Newspeak, and its Ministry of Truth — are the most widely read books of 20th-century political fiction in English. But the durable center of his work is probably the essays: "Politics and the English Language" (1946), which argued that clear writing and clear thinking are inseparable and that political prose is usually designed to defend the indefensible; "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), on the psychology of the colonial officer; "A Hanging" (1931); "Such, Such Were the Joys" (posthumous, 1952), on the English prep school; the wartime columns in Tribune; and the sustained criticism of pacifism, of the English intellectual class, of Kipling, of Dickens, of Swift.
Orwell's place in the tradition is distinctive. He was a socialist his whole adult life, and more combatively so in his last decade — he considered Labour's 1945 victory the event of his adult life — but the two political novels earned him, posthumously and against his explicit wishes, a large Cold War right-wing readership that used 1984 against the democratic socialism he had actually been trying to save from Stalinism. His concerns — the manipulation of language for political purposes, the corruption of intellectual life by orthodoxy, the surveillance state, the persistence of imperial and class contempt in societies that claim to have transcended both — remain as live in the 21st century as they were in the 20th, which is why every generation produces a new round of "Orwell was right about X" and "Orwell was wrong about Y" journalism.