Why I Write by George Orwell

If you are a writer and your name becomes an adjective, you know you have left your mark, made an impact on the world you live in. But it wasn't easy for George Orwell. He suffered a lot of setbacks and never lived to see the day that his name became an adjective.

He was born Eric Arthur Blair in India in 1903. His father worked in the opium dept of the British civil service there. After a year, his mother brought him back to England where he grew up. As an adult he struggled to make ends meet by taking any job he could find. His first major work describes these days in "Down and Out in Paris and London." He had this book published under the pseudonym, George Orwell in order not to embarrass his family.

In 1936 he was shot in the throat and arm while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938 he was diagnosed with TB. A biographer thinks that he may have caught tuberculosis while lying in the hospital being treated for his war injuries.
In 1950 he died from it only months after publishing his most famous work, 1984. He was 46 years old.

Orwell lived through 3 wars, 2 of them World Wars. In "Why I Write" he said that because of the times he lived in, he was forced to become a pamphleteer, something akin to a propagandist, almost against his will. In the last 10 years of his life his goal was to make political writing into an art. The motivation being a sense of injustice and to expose a lie. He said that when he lacked a political purpose, he wrote lifeless books.

If only every good writer had written or would write "Why I Write" what interesting insights we would have into their work.