The World of George Orwell by Professor Michael Shelden

Professor Michael Sheldon offers a series of lectures for the The Modern Scholar: World of George Orwell.  The lecturer provides information about George Orwell's life experiences and how they shaped his writing. One of his earlier books, Down and Out in Paris and London, was based on his own personal experiences fitting in with the street people of both cities.

His experience in the Spanish civil war as part of the socialist alliance in Homage to Catalonia gave him insight into the control that Joseph Stalin had over factions of the socialist groups. Stalin determined that the socialist forces that Orwell fought with were not sufficiently loyal to Moscow and spread rumors about the group that caused other socialist military groups to attack them. George and his wife escaped Spain and eventually returned to London.

George worked for the British Ministry for Information which helped him develop a similar organization for his book 1984.

He finished his book Animal Farm near the end of World War II. Several publishers sympathetic to the Soviet Union attempted to block the book from being published as they recognized the harsh critique of Stalinist Russia underlying the satire in the book.

George Orwell a life in pictures - 88 min.

20 Orwell Quotes - 3 min.