George Orwell knew from the inside everything he wrote about. Poverty, because he had lived in the doss-houses of Paris and London. Colonialism, because he had served as a policeman in Burma and hated himself for it. Totalitarianism, because he had fought in Spain and watched the Stalinists destroy their own allies.
His real name was Eric Blair. Born in India in 1903, the son of a British official, he was schooled at Eton among the children of aristocrats and felt himself an outsider. Then came Burma — not out of patriotism, but because he did not know what else to do with himself. He returned convinced that imperialism was a crime.
He wrote Animal Farm in 1943–44. Seven publishers turned it down: the timing was wrong, the USSR being an ally. The book appeared in 1945 and became a parable overnight. 1984 he finished while dying, tuberculosis eating away his lungs. It came out in 1949. A year later he was gone.
He died at forty-six, never knowing he had written the two most widely read political books of the twentieth century.