Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of June 25th
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It is the 176th day of the year, leaving 189 days remaining in 2022.
He told his stories of major political systems of the day, including socialism, totalitarianism, and imperialism, from the perspective of the individual, with precise language and distinctive opinions.
Although born in India, he was educated in England before leaving for Burma, where he worked as a policeman. As he worked, he gained a sympathy for the Burmese people, whom he realized were diminished by and opposed to their British rulers. This provided grist for some of his early writings -- the novel Burmese Days, and two works of expository prose, A Hanging, and Shooting an Elephant.
After returning to England, he worked as a journalist as he struggled to become a writer. At one point he lived and worked among the poor in East London and the slums of Paris. The result was his first book, Down and Out is Paris and London -- part essay, part novel, and part memoir.
His fame came from two of his later books. In 1945, he published Animal Farm, a fable about animals overthrowing their masters and living a socialized life on their homestead. It's seen as an attack on communism and the Russian Revolution, because the pigs, as leaders of the revolution, eventually start to become more humanlike until they are more oppressive than their prior masters.
Two years later, he published Nineteen Eighty-Four. The dystopian novel is set in the near future and presents a society that takes oppression and totalitarianism to the extreme. Big Brother watches everything, including ritualized book bannings, constant wars against an unseen enemy, re-writing of history, torture to enforce conformity, and the control of thoughts through the control of language.
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
Orwell finished writing Nineteen Eighty-Four as he was dying of tuberculosis. It has become a classis of literature, used across the world as a warning against the growing threat of totalitarian leaders and societies. It was published in 1949.
He died in January1950 in London.
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