George Orwell

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English novelist, essayist and journalist, best known for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Those two books gave everyday English a vocabulary for tyranny, from Big Brother to doublethink and thoughtcrime. Orwell served with the imperial police in Burma, lived among the poor in London and Paris, and was shot through the throat fighting in the Spanish Civil War, experiences that hardened a lifelong opposition to totalitarianism of every stripe. In essays such as Politics and the English Language he argued that vague, ugly writing is what makes political lying possible.