GEORGE ORWELL was the pen name of Eric Blair, an Englishman born in Bengal, India, and educated at Eton in England. After service with the British colonial Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he returned to Europe to earn his living writing novels and essays. Bitterly opposed to social injustice, political oppression, and verbal cant in every form, he was a socialist who attacked both capitalism and communism, a literary critic who savaged all that he saw as false to life as it was lived and reality as it was, and a novelist who merged his profound political concerns with superbly honed narrative artistry. Besides his classic Animal Farm, his major works include a novel based on his experiences as a colonial policeman, Burmese Days; two firsthand studies of poverty, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier; an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia; and the extraordinary novel of political prophecy whose title became part of our language, 1984. George Orwell died in 1950, of a neglected lung disease.