(1903–50)
an English writer of essays and novels. He was born in India and educated at Eton . His first job was with the British police in Burma (1922–7), but he reacted against his background and spent the next few years living with very little money in Paris and London. He wrote about his experiences among poor people there in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). His next book, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), described working-class life in Britain during the Depression . He joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and wrote about this in Homage to Catalonia (1938). His two best-known novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four , were written in the 1940s. In their different ways, they both show his disappointment with the results of socialist revolutions, especially in the Soviet Union.