乔治 奥威尔

网上关于他的简介不少，今谨将《大英百科全书2007》（Encyclopaedia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite ）中的词条抄下。

Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book (Down and Out in Paris and London) appeared as the work of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia). In time his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell's life-style, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel.

He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma. Their attitudes were those of the “,landless gentry” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953).

Orwell won scholarships to two of England's leading schools, Winchester and Eton, and chose the latter. He stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of accepting a scholarship to a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging,” classics of expository prose.

In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on Jan. 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields.

These experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book's publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. The main character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell's next novel, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller's assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves.

Orwell's revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois life-style but to a political reorientation as well. Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist, though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step—so common in the period—of declaring himself a communist.

Orwell's first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitledThe Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell's subsequent writing.

By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the Republican militia, serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel, damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness. Later, in May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists who were trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which many consider one of his best books.

Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically conservative strain in writing Coming Up for Air (1939), in which he uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. When war did come, Orwell was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of the Tribune, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan. At this period Orwell was a prolific journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious criticism, like his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on boys' weeklies and a number of books about England (notably The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941) that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian, decentralist socialism very much unlike that practiced by the British Labour Party.

In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In this book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals' intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose bondage is even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) At first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for this small masterpiece, but when it appeared in 1945 Animal Farm made him famous and, for the first time, prosperous.

Animal Farm was one of Orwell's finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book's hero, the Englishman Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of these states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government, which perpetuates its rule by systematically distorting the truth and continuously rewriting history to suit its own purposes. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but then they are both arrested by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity until he can love only the figure he previously most hated: the apparent leader of the party, Big Brother. Smith's surrender to the monstrous brainwashing techniques of his jailers is tragic enough, but the novel gains much of its power from the comprehensive rigour with which it extends the premises of totalitarianism to their logical end: the love of power and domination over others has acquired its perfected expression in the perpetual surveillance and omnipresent dishonesty of an unassailable and irresistible police state under whose rule every human virtue is slowly being suborned and extinguished. Orwell's warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book's title and many of its coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,” “doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses.

Orwell wrote the last pages of Nineteen Eighty-four in a remote house on the Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds of Animal Farm. He worked between bouts of hospitalization for tuberculosis, of which he died in a London hospital in January 1950.

未完待续……

乔治 奥威尔

1903年生于印度孟买，1950年1月21日死于伦敦

。乔治 奥威尔

原名艾力克 阿瑟 布莱尔，小说家，散文家，因为《动物农庄》（1945）和《1984》（1949）闻名于世，《1984》是一部反乌托邦小说，提醒人们极权统治的危险。

  奥威尔原名艾力克 阿瑟 布莱尔，他始终没有抛弃原名。他的第一本书（巴黎伦敦落魄记）是用乔治奥威尔的名字发表的（这个奥威尔的姓是从美丽的奥威尔河得来的）。只有很少的几位亲戚知道他的真名是布莱尔。改名的事折射了奥威尔从大英帝国臣民到政治文学叛逆的过程。

   他出生在孟加拉，父亲是英国驻印度殖民地的一位小官员，他的母亲是法国人，外祖父是一位在缅甸做柚木生意的不成功商人。属于“无地绅士”，中产阶级中靠下的那部分，收入微薄不济地位。奥威尔在穷酸的氛围中被带大。跟随父母回国后，1911年他被送入sussex海岸的寄宿预备学校，在那里他以贫困和聪明在男孩中出了名。他成了一位孤僻畏缩的男孩，这段苦涩的经历写进了他的自传体小说-这就是欢乐（1953）

   奥威尔获得两所名校的奖学金：WINCHESTER和伊顿。他选择了伊顿。1917至1921年他在那读书。他没有接受奖学金上大学，遵循家庭传统他1922年去了缅甸成了皇家警察的一员。他在几个乡村警察所供职而且还是模范。然而他还在小时候就想成为作家，而且他认识到英国的统治是多么的违反缅甸人的意愿。对作为一个殖民地官员的身份他觉得越来越羞耻。后来他的这段经历他写进了“射象”，“绞刑”这两个光辉的短篇，以及缅甸岁月。

   1927年奥威尔返回英国决定不回缅甸，1928年1月1日他从皇家警察辞职。1927年秋天他就向作家迈出了关键的一步。因为对在缅甸时的种族隔离同缅甸人的疏离。他穿上破衣烂衫来到伦敦东区住在棚户区跟乞丐和工人混在一起。他还在巴黎贫民窟呆过，在法国的旅馆酒店里做过洗衣工。还在英国跟流浪者一起流浪。

  这段经历成了《巴黎伦敦落魄记》的素材，这篇文章的体裁很像小说了。这本书在1933年的出版为他在文学上赢得了一定的声誉。奥威尔在1934年的第一部小说缅甸岁月出版，描写了一位敏感、有同情心、孤僻的人，在压抑和虚伪的社会环境中觉得很不自在。主人公想从缅甸的狭隘虚伪的英国同胞中逃脱。他对缅甸人十分同情，最后因不能预见的个人悲剧而终结。1935年奥威尔的《小职员的女儿》，这位不快乐的女孩在一群农业工人中找到了暂时的解放。《让抱蛋蜘蛛一直飞行吧》说的是一位书商助手他藐视中产阶级空洞的商业道德和物质主义，但是为了能够和深爱的女孩结婚，最后他妥协了。

   奥威尔对帝国主义的憎恶不仅在个人生活上反对资产阶级的生活方式，而且在政治立场上也有所改变。从缅甸回来后，他自称无政府主义者，如此保留了好几年。1930年代他自称社会主义者，虽然他太过自由不能采取进一步的行动---在那时候自称社会主义者是如此普通。

    奥威尔第一本社会主义方面的书籍是《维根码头之路》。以描述自己跟北英格兰的失业穷困矿工共同生活开始，分享和观察他们的生活，结束于对现存社会主义运动的激烈批评。这种结合了现代报道和愤怒成为奥威尔以后作品的风格。

   在《通往维根码头之路》时，奥威尔在西班牙，他去采访西班牙内战并留在那里参加了共和政府，在阿拉贡前线服役并升到了中尉。他在TERUEL受了重伤，喉咙受伤影响了他的声音，让他的演讲带着一种奇怪的沉默意味。1937年5月，，因反对共产党人对证见不同者的清洗，他逃离了西班牙。这段经历让他终生对共产主义保持恐惧态度。《向嘉泰罗尼西亚致敬》反映了这段经历被认为是他最好的作品。

   回到英国后，奥威尔抱着自相矛盾的保守态度写了《上来透口气》（1939），主人公是一位中年英国男子，对自己的过去做了反省并且对未来战争和法西斯的担忧。当战争真的来临的时候，奥威尔请求服役被军队拒绝，他在BBC对印度广播。1943年他离开了BBC成为一家左翼报纸的战争报道编辑。在这期间他是个多产的记者写了许多新闻报道和评论，还写了许多批评性的文章，包括经典的评狄更斯的文论。

   1944年奥威尔完成了动物农庄，一部政治寓言，基于俄国革命和史达林的背叛。在寓言里，一群动物起来反抗赶走了他们的主人成立了自己的社会。最后动物里的智囊和权力狂热者-猪颠覆了革命成立了独裁统治，甚至比人类还更加压制和冷酷。（所有动物是平等的，但是有些动物比其他的更加平等）一开始奥威尔很难找到出版商来出版这个小册子，1945年它出版时给他带来了巨大的荣誉，第一次带来了财富。

   动物农庄是奥威尔最好的作品，充满了智慧和反讽。然而它被他最后一本书超过了《1984》，作为身处纳粹主义和史达林主义夹缝中多年生活的作家的警告。故事的背景设在未来，世界被三个军事极权警察国家统治。主人公是一位英国人温斯顿史密斯，是一位小职员。他对真理的追求使他走上反对政府的道路，政府借系统的扭曲真理和改写历史来为统治服务。史密斯和一位有头脑的女人有性关系，他们都被思想警察逮捕了。酷刑下垮掉的不仅是史密斯的身体还有他独立的人格，最后他转而爱上他一直憎恨的：老大哥。史密斯在精神上的独立已经很可悲了，然而让他的书具有力量的是为了追求对他人的权力和统治，这样一种欲望在一个警察国家里得到了完美的表达。

   奥威尔在一座偏僻的房子完成了1984的最后手稿，1950年1月他死于伦敦的一座医院