George Orwell

Orwell was born Eric Blair in Bengal and educated on scholarship at Eton, then joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma at nineteen, five years of enforcing colonial rule that left him, by his own account, riddled with guilt, and supplied Burmese Days and the essay 'Shooting an Elephant.' He resigned in 1927, deliberately lived in poverty among tramps and dishwashers in Paris and London, and adopted his pen name for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

In 1936 he went to fight fascism in Spain with a Trotskyist militia, was shot through the throat by a sniper, and nearly died: an experience that hardened his lifelong hatred of totalitarian propaganda, recorded in Homage to Catalonia. Animal Farm (1945) satirized the Russian Revolution's betrayal; Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in a rush while he was dying, followed in 1949. He succumbed to tuberculosis in a London hospital in January 1950, at forty-six.