1984 author biography essay

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Cyrano De Bergerac. Galileo Galilei. Ingsoc English Socialism is the predominant ideology and philosophy of Oceania, and Newspeak is the official language of official documents. Orwell depicts the Party's ideology as an oligarchical world view that "rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it does so in the name of Socialism.

Big Brother is a fictional character and symbol in the novel. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party Ingsoc wields total power "for its own sake".

1984 author biography essay

In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen except of the proles, who are regarded as little more than animals is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens. The people are constantly reminded of this by the widely displayed slogan "Big Brother is watching you". In modern culture, the term "Big Brother" has entered the lexicon as a synonym for abuse of government power, particularly in respect to mass surveillance.

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.

But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The Principles of Newspeak is an academic essay appended to the novel. It describes the development of Newspeak, an artificial, minimalistic language designed to ideologically align thought with the principles of Ingsoc by stripping down the English language in order to make "heretical" thoughts i. Whether or not the Newspeak appendix implies a hopeful end to Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a critical debate.

Many claim that it does, citing the fact that it is in standard English and is written in the past tense : "Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised" p. Some critics Atwood , [ 48 ] Benstead, [ 49 ] Milner , [ 50 ] Pynchon [ 51 ] claim that for Orwell, Newspeak and the totalitarian governments are all in the past.

Thoughtcrime describes a person's politically unorthodox thoughts, such as unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc English Socialism , the dominant ideology of Oceania. In the official language of Newspeak, the word crimethink describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of the Party controls the speech, the actions, and the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania.

Nineteen Eighty-Four expands upon the subjects summarised in Orwell's essay " Notes on Nationalism " [ 55 ] about the lack of vocabulary needed to explain the unrecognised phenomena behind certain political forces. In Nineteen Eighty-Four , the Party's artificial, minimalist language 'Newspeak' addresses the matter. O'Brien concludes: "The object of persecution is persecution.

The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever. One of the most notable themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four is censorship , especially in the Ministry of Truth, where photographs and public archives are manipulated to rid them of "unpersons" people who have been erased from history by the Party. One small example of the endless censorship is Winston being charged with the task of eliminating a reference to an unperson in a newspaper article.

He also proceeds to write an article about Comrade Ogilvy, a made-up party member who allegedly "displayed great heroism by leaping into the sea from a helicopter so that the dispatches he was carrying would not fall into enemy hands. In Oceania, the upper and middle classes have very little true privacy. All of their houses and apartments are equipped with two-way telescreens so that they may be watched or listened to at any time.

Similar telescreens are found at workstations and in public places, along with hidden microphones. Written correspondence is routinely opened and read by the government before it is delivered. The Thought Police employ undercover agents, who pose as normal citizens and report any person with subversive tendencies. Children are encouraged to report suspicious persons to the government, and some denounce their parents.

Citizens are controlled, and the smallest sign of rebellion, even something as small as a suspicious facial expression, can result in immediate arrest and imprisonment. Thus, citizens are compelled to obedience. According to Orwell's book, almost the entire world lives in poverty; hunger, thirst, disease, and filth are the norms. Ruined cities and towns are common: the consequence of perpetual wars and extreme economic inefficiency.

Social decay and wrecked buildings surround Winston; aside from the ministries' headquarters, little of London was rebuilt. Middle class citizens and proles consume synthetic foodstuffs and poor-quality "luxuries" such as oily gin and loosely-packed cigarettes, distributed under the "Victory" brand, a parody of the low-quality Indian-made "Victory" cigarettes, which British soldiers commonly smoked during World War II.

Winston describes something as simple as the repair of a broken window as requiring committee approval that can take several years and so most of those living in one of the blocks usually do the repairs themselves Winston himself is called in by Mrs. Parsons to repair her blocked sink. All upper-class and middle-class residences include telescreens that serve both as outlets for propaganda and surveillance devices that allow the Thought Police to monitor them; they can be turned down, but the ones in middle-class residences cannot be turned off.

In contrast to their subordinates, the upper class of Oceanian society reside in clean and comfortable flats in their own quarters, with pantries well-stocked with foodstuffs such as wine, real coffee, real tea, real milk, and real sugar, all denied to the general populace. All upper class citizens are attended to by slaves captured in the "disputed zone", and "The Book" suggests that many have their own cars or even helicopters.

However, despite their insulation and overt privileges, the upper class are still not exempt from the government's brutal restriction of thought and behaviour, even while lies and propaganda apparently originate from their own ranks. Instead, the Oceanian government offers the upper class their "luxuries" in exchange for maintaining their loyalty to the state; non-conformant upper-class citizens can still be condemned, tortured, and executed just like any other individual.

The proles live in poverty and are kept sedated with pornography, a national lottery whose big prizes are reported won by non-existent people, and gin, "which the proles were not supposed to drink". At the same time, the proles are freer and less intimidated than the upper classes: they are not expected to be particularly patriotic and the levels of surveillance that they are subjected to are very low; they lack telescreens in their own homes.

Winston nonetheless believes that "the future belonged to the proles". The standard of living of the populace is extremely low overall. The Party monitors facial expressions and aims to find out and control the thoughts of citizens through the " Thought Police " and the detection and elimination of " thoughtcrime ". It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen.

The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example was itself a punishable offence.

One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed.

The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. Nineteen Eighty-Four uses themes from life in the Soviet Union and wartime life in Great Britain as sources for many of its motifs. Some time at an unspecified date after the first American publication of the book, producer Sidney Sheldon wrote to Orwell interested in adapting the novel to the Broadway stage.

Orwell wrote in a letter to Sheldon to whom he would sell the US stage rights that his basic goal with Nineteen Eighty-Four was imagining the consequences of Stalinist government ruling British society:. According to Orwell biographer D. It's about somebody who is spied upon, and eavesdropped upon, and oppressed by vast exterior forces they can do nothing about.

It makes an attempt at rebellion and then has to compromise". The slogan was seen in electric lights on Moscow house-fronts, billboards and elsewhere. The switch of Oceania's allegiance from Eastasia to Eurasia and the subsequent rewriting of history "Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete"; ch 9 is evocative of the Soviet Union's changing relations with Nazi Germany.

The two nations were open and frequently vehement critics of each other until the signing of the Treaty of Non-Aggression. Thereafter, and continuing until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in , no criticism of Germany was allowed in the Soviet press, and all references to prior party lines stopped—including in the majority of non-Russian communist parties who tended to follow the Russian line.

It was too much for many of the fellow-travellers like Gollancz [Orwell's sometime publisher] who had put their faith in a strategy of construction Popular Front governments and the peace bloc between Russia, Britain and France. The description of Emmanuel Goldstein, with a "small, goatee beard", evokes the image of Leon Trotsky.

The film of Goldstein during the Two Minutes Hate is described as showing him being transformed into a bleating sheep. This image was used in a propaganda film during the Kino-eye period of Soviet film, which showed Trotsky transforming into a goat. The omnipresent images of Big Brother, a man described as having a moustache, bears resemblance to the cult of personality built up around Joseph Stalin.

The news in Oceania emphasised production figures, just as it did in the Soviet Union, where record-setting in factories by " Heroes of Socialist Labour " was especially glorified. The best known of these was Alexei Stakhanov , who purportedly set a record for coal mining in The tortures of the Ministry of Love evoke the procedures used by the NKVD in their interrogations, [ 76 ] [ page needed ] including the use of rubber truncheons, being forbidden to put your hands in your pockets, remaining in brightly lit rooms for days, torture through the use of their greatest fear, and the victim being shown a mirror after their physical collapse.

The random bombing of Airstrip One is based on the area bombing of London by Buzz bombs and the V-2 rocket in — The confessions of the "Thought Criminals" Rutherford, Aaronson, and Jones are based on the show trials of the s, which included fabricated confessions by prominent Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin , Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to the effect that they were being paid by the Nazi government to undermine the Soviet regime under Leon Trotsky 's direction.

The song " Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree " "Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me" was based on an old English song called "Go no more a-rushing" "Under the spreading chestnut tree, Where I knelt upon my knee, We were as happy as could be, 'Neath the spreading chestnut tree. The song was published as early as The song was a popular camp song in the s, sung with corresponding movements like touching one's chest when singing "chest", and touching one's head when singing "nut".

Glenn Miller recorded the song in The "Hates" Two Minutes Hate and Hate Week were inspired by the constant rallies sponsored by party organs throughout the Stalinist period. These were often short pep-talks given to workers before their shifts began Two Minutes Hate , [ 80 ] but could also last for days, as in the annual celebrations of the anniversary of the October Revolution Hate Week.

Orwell fictionalised "newspeak", "doublethink", and "Ministry of Truth" based on both the Soviet press, and British wartime usage, such as "Miniform". Winston Smith's job, "revising history" and the "unperson" motif are based on censorship of images in the Soviet Union , which airbrushed images of "fallen" people from group photographs and removed references to them in books and newspapers.

After his fall from power and execution, subscribers received a letter from the editor [ 85 ] instructing them to cut out and destroy the three-page article on Beria and paste in its place enclosed replacement pages expanding the adjacent articles on F. Bergholz an 18th-century courtier , the Bering Sea , and Bishop Berkeley. Big Brother's "Orders of the Day" were inspired by Stalin's regular wartime orders, called by the same name.

A small collection of the more political of these have been published together with his wartime speeches in English as On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin. The Ingsoc slogan "Our new, happy life", repeated from telescreens, evokes Stalin's statement, which became a CPSU slogan, "Life has become better, Comrades; life has become more cheerful.

The story concludes with an appendix describing the success of the project. Borges' story addresses similar themes of epistemology , language and history to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm share themes of the betrayed revolution, the individual's subordination to the collective, rigorously enforced class distinctions Inner Party, Outer Party, proles , the cult of personality , concentration camps , Thought Police , compulsory regimented daily exercise, and youth leagues.

It is a naval power whose militarism venerates the sailors of the floating fortresses, from which battle is given to recapturing India, the "Jewel in the Crown" of the British Empire. Altered photographs and newspaper articles create unpersons deleted from the national historical record, including even founding members of the regime Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford in the s purges viz the Soviet Purges of the s, in which leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were similarly treated.

A similar thing also happened during the French Revolution 's Reign of Terror in which many of the original leaders of the Revolution were later put to death, for example Danton who was put to death by Robespierre , and then later Robespierre himself met the same fate. In his essay " Why I Write ", Orwell explains that the serious works he wrote since the Spanish Civil War —39 were "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism ".

Biographer Michael Shelden notes Orwell's Edwardian childhood at Henley-on-Thames as the golden country; being bullied at St Cyprian's School as his empathy with victims; his life in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and the techniques of violence and censorship in the BBC as capricious authority. Extrapolating from World War II, the novel's pastiche parallels the politics and rhetoric at war's end—the changed alliances at the " Cold War 's" —91 beginning; the Ministry of Truth derives from the BBC's overseas service, controlled by the Ministry of Information ; Room derives from a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House ; [ 99 ] the Senate House of the University of London, containing the Ministry of Information is the architectural inspiration for the Minitrue; the post-war decrepitude derives from the socio-political life of the UK and the US, i.

The term "English Socialism" has precedents in Orwell's wartime writings; in the essay " The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius " , he said that "the war and the revolution are inseparable Given the middle class's grasping this, they too would abide socialist revolution and that only reactionary Britons would oppose it, thus limiting the force revolutionaries would need to take power.

An English Socialism would come about which "will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word.

In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four , "English Socialism" or " Ingsoc " in Newspeak is a totalitarian ideology unlike the English revolution he foresaw. Comparison of the wartime essay "The Lion and the Unicorn" with Nineteen Eighty-Four shows that he perceived a Big Brother regime as a perversion of his cherished socialist ideals and English Socialism.

Thus Oceania is a corruption of the British Empire he believed would evolve "into a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics". When it was first published, Nineteen Eighty-Four received critical acclaim. Pritchett , reviewing the novel for the New Statesman stated: "I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down.

Forster and Harold Nicolson. Lewis was also critical of the novel, claiming that the relationship of Julia and Winston, and especially the Party's view on sex, lacked credibility, and that the setting was "odious rather than tragic". Deutscher argued that Orwell had struggled to comprehend the dialectical philosophy of Marxism, demonstrated personal ambivalence towards other strands of socialism and his work, , had been appropriated for the purpose of anti-communist Cold War propaganda.

On its publication, many American reviewers interpreted the book as a statement on British Prime Minister Clement Attlee's socialist policies, or the policies of Joseph Stalin. American trade union leader Francis A. Hanson wanted to recommend the book to his members but was concerned with some of the reviews it had received, so Orwell wrote a letter to him.

I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will necessarily arrive, but I believe allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire that something resembling it could arrive Writing in The Captive Mind , he stated "[a] few have become acquainted with Orwell's ; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party.

Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life. Only one or two years after Orwell's death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party.

The first feature film adaptation, , was released in A second feature-length adaptation, Nineteen Eighty-Four , followed in , a reasonably faithful adaptation of the novel. The story has been adapted several other times to radio, television, and film; other media adaptations include theater a musical [ ] and a play , opera , and ballet.

The novel was banned in the Soviet Union until , when the first publicly available Russian version in the country, translated by Vyacheslav Nedoshivin, was published in Kodry , a literary journal of Soviet Moldavia. In , another Russian version, translated by Viktor Golyshev , was also published. Outside the Soviet Union, the first Russian version was serialised in the emigre magazine Grani in the mids, then published as a book in in Frankfurt.

Another Russian version, translated by Sergei Tolstoy from French version, was published in Rome in These translations were smuggled into the Soviet Union, which became quite popular among dissidents. For Soviet elite, as early as , according to the order of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the Foreign Literature Publishers secretly issued a Russian version of the novel, for the senior officers of the Communist Party.

In the People's Republic of China, the first Simplified Chinese version, translated by Dong Leshan , was serialised in the periodical Selected Translations from Foreign Literature in , for senior officials and intellectuals deemed politically reliable enough. In , the Chinese version was published by Huacheng Publishing House, as a restricted publication.

It was first available to the general public in , by the same publisher. By , Nineteen Eighty-Four had been translated into 65 languages, more than any other novel in English at that time. The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on the English language is extensive; the concepts of Big Brother , Room , the Thought Police , thoughtcrime , unperson , memory hole oblivion , doublethink simultaneously holding and believing contradictory beliefs and Newspeak ideological language have become common phrases for denoting totalitarian authority.

Doublespeak and groupthink are both deliberate elaborations of doublethink , and the adjective "Orwellian" means similar to Orwell's writings, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four. The practice of ending words with "-speak" such as mediaspeak is drawn from the novel. References to the themes, concepts and plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four have appeared frequently in other works, especially in popular music and video entertainment.

An example is the worldwide hit reality television show Big Brother , in which a group of people live together in a large house, isolated from the outside world but continuously watched by television cameras. In response, Justice Stephen Breyer questioned what that means for a democratic society by referencing Nineteen Eighty-Four , stating "If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States.

So if you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like Nineteen Eighty-Four The book touches on the invasion of privacy and ubiquitous surveillance. From mid it was publicised that the NSA has been secretly monitoring and storing global internet traffic, including the bulk data collection of email and phone call data. Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four increased by up to seven times within the first week of the mass surveillance leaks.

It depends on you. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album , imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: is watching you. With the arrival of the year , the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level.

That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man—oppressive technology—to the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong.

The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. What does the novel mean for us? Not Room in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear.

Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us. My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside They pointed back to the 20th century—if it happened in Germany, it could happen here—and warned readers how easily democracies collapse.

The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. For several weeks, he was unable to speak. Orwell and his wife, Eileen, were indicted on treason charges in Spain. Fortunately, the charges were brought after the couple had left the country. Other health problems plagued the talented writer not long after his return to England.

For years, Orwell had periods of sickness, and he was officially diagnosed with tuberculosis in He spent several months at the Preston Hall Sanatorium trying to recover, but he would continue to battle with tuberculosis for the rest of his life. At the time he was initially diagnosed, there was no effective treatment for the disease.

To support himself, Orwell took on various writing assignments. He wrote numerous essays and reviews over the years, developing a reputation for producing well-crafted literary criticism. In , Orwell landed a job with the BBC as a producer. He developed news commentary and shows for audiences in the eastern part of the British Empire.

Orwell drew such literary greats as T. Eliot and E. Forster to appear on his programs. With World War II raging on, Orwell found himself acting as a propagandist to advance the country's national interest. I believe that in the present political situation the broadcasting of British propaganda to India is an almost hopeless task. Sometimes called the conscience of a generation, Orwell is best known for two novels: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Animal Farm was an anti-Soviet satire in a pastoral setting featuring two pigs as its main protagonists. These pigs were said to represent Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. The novel brought Orwell great acclaim and financial rewards. This bleak vision of the world divided into three oppressive nations stirred up controversy among reviewers, who found this fictional future too despairing.

In the novel, Orwell gave readers a glimpse into what would happen if the government controlled every detail of a person's life, down to their own private thoughts.