When Orwell came home from Burma he lived as a tramp for four years. He put on ragged clothes and lived with laborers and beggars in the slums of London and Paris. He worked in the hopfields in Kent and as a dishwasher in a French hotel, and wrote about it in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) under the pen name George Orwell, after the River Orwell in East Anglia.
He published his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), the next year. Animal Farm (1945) was the book that made him famous. It's a political fable about Stalinism. A group of barnyard animals chase off their human masters and set up their own society, but then the smartest animals, the pigs, take control and turn out to be even more ruthless than the humans. He wrote, "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."
At first Orwell couldn't find a publisher for Animal Farm, but when it came out it was an instant success and for the first time Orwell had some money in his pocket. In some countries, Animal Farm was distributed by the United States government. When Orwell died, the C.I.A. secretly bought the movie rights to the book from Orwell's widow, made an animated-film version in England, and sent it all over the world. Orwell used the royalties from Animal Farm to buy a remote house on the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland. He had tuberculosis, and when he wasn't too sick to type he smoked black shag tobacco and wrote his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a novel set in a future where the world is controlled by totalitarian police states.
The book gave us words and phrases such as "Big Brother is watching you," "Thought Police," "newspeak," and "doublethink." He said, "On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."
~Writer's Almanac
