George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, British India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was a minor official in the Indian civil service, and his mother, Ida Mabel Blair, came from a family with French-Burmese roots. He grew up with two sisters, Marjorie and Avril, and spent most of his childhood in England after his mother took the children back from India. Orwell’s literary language was English, the language in which he wrote all his major works. His Burma years also seem to have left him with some working Burmese, though English remained his true public voice.

As an adult, Orwell never had a large or settled family life, but he did have one. He married Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1936, and in 1944 they adopted a son, Richard Blair. After Eileen died in 1945, Orwell raised Richard for a time while continuing to write through worsening illness. His adult life was restless and varied: he served in Burma, lived in poverty in Paris and London, fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked as a journalist and essayist, spent time with the BBC during the war years, and later withdrew to the remote Scottish island of Jura, where he completed Nineteen Eighty-Four. Near the end of his life, he married Sonia Brownell in 1949.

Orwell died of tuberculosis in London, England, on January 21, 1950, at the age of 46. He died only months after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel that would make his name almost impossible to escape in modern political thought. Though he died young, he left behind far more than 1984. He also gave us Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in Paris and London, and some of the clearest political essays of the twentieth century. He was buried at All Saints’ Church, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire.