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Why did George Orwell have a pen name?
How did Eric Blair choose the pen name George Orwell?
Why was George Orwell called George?
Why did George Orwell name himself after the River Orwell?
He finally adopted the pen name George Orwell because "It is a good round English name." The name George was inspired by the patron saint of England, and Orwell after the River Orwell in Suffolk which was one of Orwell's favourite locations.
The source cited (The Paradox of George Orwell by Richard Voorhees) gives a simple reason for the choice of this name: When he was twenty-seven, he took as a pseudonym the name by which he is generally known, Orwell, from a river in Suffolk near which he once lived, and George as a typical English name.
- We don't know for sure, but he may have known the river. Blair originally submitted a list of four possible pseudonyms to his agent, Leonard Moore,...
- The source cited ( The Paradox of George Orwell by Richard Voorhees) gives a simple reason for the choice of this name: When he was twenty-seven, h...
- As the questioner implies, I too can't help but think there is more to choosing George Orwell as a pen name than has come to light. To think it arb...
- I thought there was a section in Down & Out when he was on the boat back to the UK when someone asked him the name of the river they were on (which...
- George Orwell Attended Prep School as A Child—And Hated it.
- He Was A Prankster.
- Orwell Worked A Number of Odd Jobs For Most of His career.
- He Once Got Himself Arrested—On Purpose.
- Orwell Had Knuckle Tattoos.
- He Knew Seven Foreign Languages, to Varying degrees.
- He Voluntarily Fought in The Spanish Civil War.
- Orwell's Manuscript For Animal Farm Was Nearly Destroyed by A Bomb.
- He Had A Goat Named Muriel.
- George Orwell Coined The Term Cold War.
Eric Blair spent five years at the St. Cyprian School for boys in Eastbourne, England, which later inspired his melodramatic essay Such, Such Were the Joys. In this account, he called the school’s proprietors “terrible, all-powerful monsters” and labeled the institution itself "an expensive and snobbish school which was in process of becoming more ...
Blair was expelled from his "crammer" school (an institution designed to help students "cram" for specific exams) for sending a birthday message attached to a dead rat to the town surveyor, according to Sir Bernard Crick's George Orwell: A Life, the first complete biography of Orwell. And while studying at Eton College, Orwell made up a song about ...
Everyone’s got to pay the bills, and Blair was no exception. He spent most of his career juggling part-time jobs while authoring books on the side. Over the years, he worked as a police officer for the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (present-day Myanmar), a high school teacher, a bookstore clerk, a propagandist for the BBC during World War II, a l...
In 1931, while investigating poverty for his aforementioned memoir, Orwell intentionally got himself arrested for being “drunk and incapable.” This was done “in order to get a taste of prison and to bring himself closer to the tramps and small-time villains with whom he mingled,” biographer Gordon Bowker told The Guardian. At the time, he had been ...
While working as a police officer in Burma, Orwell got his knuckles tattooed. Adrian Fierz, who knew Orwell, told biographer Gordon Bowker that the tattoos were small blue spots, “the shape of small grapefruits,” and Orwell had one on each knuckle. Orwell noted that some Burmese tribes believed tattoos would protect them from bullets. He may have g...
Orwell wrote in a 1944 newspaper column, “In my life I have learned seven foreign languages, including two dead ones, and out of those seven I retain only one, and that not brilliantly.” In his youth, he learned French from Aldous Huxley, who briefly taught at Orwell’s boarding school and later went on to write Brave New World. Orwell ultimately be...
Like fellow writer Ernest Hemingway and others with leftist leanings, Orwell got tangled up in the Spanish Civil War. At the age of 33, Orwell arrived in Spain, shortly after fighting had broken out in 1936, hoping to write some newspaper articles. Instead, he ended up joining the Republican militia to “fight fascism” because “it seemed the only co...
In 1944, Orwell’s home at 10 Mortimer Crescent in London was struck by a “doodlebug” (a German V-1 flying bomb). Orwell, his wife Eileen, and their son Richard Horatio were away at the time, but their home was demolished. During his lunch break at the British newspaper Tribune, Orwell would return to the foundation where his home once stood and sif...
He and his wife Eileen tended to several farm animals at their home in Wallington, England, including Muriel the goat. A goat by the same name in Orwell’s book Animal Farmis described as being one of the few intelligent and morally sound animals on the farm, making her one of the more likable characters in this dark work of dystopian fiction.
The first recorded usage of the phrase cold war in reference to relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union can be traced back to Orwell’s 1945 essay You and the Atom Bomb, which was written two months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the essay, he described “a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent st...
- Emily Petsko
Jun 27, 2024 · Why was George Orwell famous? George Orwell wrote two hugely influential novels: Animal Farm (1944), a satire that allegorically depicted Joseph Stalin ’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a chilling warning against totalitarianism.
- George Orwell wrote the political fable Animal Farm (1944), the anti-utopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the unorthodox political treatise T...
- George Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and Eton colleges. He briefly attended the former before transferrin...
- George Orwell was brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery, first in India and then in England. His father was a minor British official...
- George Orwell wrote two hugely influential novels: Animal Farm (1944), a satire that allegorically depicted Joseph Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian...
No one is 100% sure how Eric Blair chose the pen name George Orwell. The general consensus is that he chose "George" because it was a typical English name and "Orwell" after a river in Suffolk. I personally believe that he chose the name "George" after Saint George, the patron saint of England.
Because he was earning his living as a teacher when his novel was scheduled for publication, he preferred to publish it under a pseudonym (a made-up name used by an author to disguise his or her true identity).
Orwell also had complex reasons for using a pen name. Too complex perhaps as we would have had to summarise these in fifty to seventy words to fit an exhibition label. Orwell’s biographers have written thousands of words on why he used a pen name without reaching any consensus.
