George Orwell

George Orwell was Eric Blair, an Etonian who served in the Burmese police, lived among the poor of Paris and London, went to the coal mines of Wigan, was shot through the throat fighting for the anarchists in Spain, and came home to write against totalitarianism from the left. Animal Farm of 1945, a fable of the Russian revolution in a farmyard, was refused by four publishers because Russia was an ally; Nineteen Eighty-Four followed in 1949, months before he died of tuberculosis at forty-six. The essays, on language, politics and Dickens, are the plainest English prose of the century.