That’s especially impressive, given that he died in 1950. While spending the last three years immersed in the works of George Orwell for a book I was researching and writing, I often was struck by how often his writing speaks to the problems of today. Ricks is the author of six books, most recently Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, published this month (May 23) by Penguin Press. Prior to writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell wrote and published essays on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Jack London's The Iron Heel (1907), and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924), dystopian novels set in an imaginary future, and James Burnham's nonfiction political tract The Managerial Revolution (1941).Thomas E. Wells's anti-Utopian satire When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), but Orwell was also influenced by the writings of the 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels (1726). The primary literary model for Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered to be H.G. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel. In addition, a number of writers wrote Dystopian novels, in which they imagined the worst possible society, and used it to criticize their current world. But Utopia did give the genre a name, and numerous writers over the years wrote their own Utopian novels. Utopia was not the first book to imagine a perfect society Plato's Republic, for example, does the same thing. Its title meant, in Greek, either 'good place' or 'no place,' and the book described an ideal society in order to criticize More's own society. In 1516, Sir Thomas More published a book called Utopia.

In 1947 a lung infection contracted in Burma worsened, and in 1950 Orwell succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 46. Both books were widely considered to be indictments of Communism under Joseph Stalin, but Orwell insisted that they were critiques of totalitarian ideas in general, and warned that the nightmarish conditions he depicted could take place anywhere. He is best known for his satires of totalitarian rule: Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Through his autobiographical work about poverty in London ( Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933), his experiences in colonial Burma ( Burmese Days, 1934) and in the Spanish Civil War ( Homage to Catalonia, 1938), and the plight of unemployed coal miners in England ( The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937), Blair (who wrote under the name George Orwell) exposed and critiqued the human tendency to oppress others politically, economically, and physically. From 1922-27 he served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.

Eric Blair was born and spent his youth in India.

1984 novel