Animal Farm by George Orwell The author: George Orwell (1903-1950), whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, was born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was a civil servant in the British colonial government. In 1904 he moved with his mother and sister to England and studied at Eton. He began writing at an early age and was even published in college periodicals, but he didn't like school. Orwell failed to win a university scholarship and without the opportunity to continue his studies he went to Burma and served in the University administration. Imperial Indian Police from 1922 to 1927, when he resigned partly due to his growing dislike of British imperialism, a dislike he expressed in his essays Shooting an Elephant (1950) and A Hang (1931). When Orwell returned to Europe he was in poor financial condition. For the next two years he lived in Paris and then came to England as a school teacher. He later worked in a bookstore and decided to become a professional writer. From 1930 Orwell became a regular contributor to the New Adelphi, and in 1933 he took the name "George Orwell" by which he would become famous. For his first novel he used his recent experience with poverty as inspiration and wrote Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). While teaching at a private school he published his second major work, Burmese Days (1934). Two years later Orwell married Eileen O'Shaugnessy. During the 1930s Orwell had adopted the views of a socialist and in 1937 he traveled to Spain to report on their civil war. He sided with the Marxist United Workers Party militia and fought alongside them, which earned him a wound in the neck. It was this war that made him hate communism in favor of English-style socialism. Orwell wrote a book about Spain, Homage to Catalonia, which was published in 1938. During the Second World War Orwell served as a sergeant in the Home Guard and also worked as a journalist for the BBC, Observer and Tribune, where he was a literary editor. from 1943 to 1945. It was in the winter of 1943/44 that he wrote Animal Farm and, once the war was over, he moved to Scotland. It was Animal Farm that made Orwell finally prosperous. His other worldwide success was 1984, published in 1949, which Orwell said was written "to alter other people's ideas of the kind of society to which they should aspire"..