George Orwell and Animal Farm and 1984George Orwell is only a pseudonym. The man behind the classics Animal Farm and 1984 was called Eric Arthur Blair and was born to a middle class family living in Bengal in 1903. Eric Blair got his first taste of class prejudice at a young age when his mother forced him to abandon his playmates. , who were the plumber's sons (Crick 9). He could therefore only play with the other children in the family, who were at least five years older or younger than Eric (Crick 12). This created in him a sense of alienation that plagued him throughout his life and appears to be reflected in the bitter decay and loneliness he later expressed in his novel 1984. As he moved unsuccessfully from job to job, he never truly developed a sense of alienation. self-esteem. His childhood self-esteem had already been marred by bed-wetting, of which Orwell biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that "it was only the first of countless episodes that made Orwell feel guilty: he was poor, he was lazy and a failure, ungrateful". and unhealthy, disgusting and dirty-minded, weak, ugly, cowardly" (23). His writings, under the name George Orwell, and in particular his two major novels, mentioned above, contain themes that warn readers of the dangers present in modern society, a world he saw dark and repressive through the filter of his unhappy childhood and two world wars Despite the sometimes dark settings, his works are very accessible, which has made him popular among those who usually are not comfortable with more intellectual fiction. His works deal with serious themes and contain a specific focus, making them valid literary works and not just popular fiction. it is Orwell's rule. 1984 shows the dictator's tendency to want to control every aspect of a people's actions, feelings and thoughts. A single man, with absolute power over the armed forces, the government and the minds of a country, it inevitably produces a lower standard of living, a constant fear of arrest, and a tendency towards state-sanctioned killings in order to establish and sustain the regime. This modern danger, along with Orwell's expression of his own personal alienation, is what is depicted through the dark humor of Animal Farm and the poverty and paranoia of 1984. Works Cited Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. Meyers, Jeffrey. A Reader's Guide to George Orwell. Ottawa: Rowman and Allanheld, 1975. Orwell, George. 1984. New York: The New American Library, 1961. Orwell, George. Animal farm. New York: Penguin Books, 1946.