All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays: Critical Essays

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 in Motihari in Bengal, India and later studied at Eton College for four years. He was an assistant superintendent with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He left that position after five years and moved to Paris, where he wrote his first two books: Burmese Days and Down and Out in Paris and London. He then moved to Spain to write but decided to join the United Workers Marxist Party Militia. After being decidedly opposed to communism, he served in the British Home Guard and with the Indian Service of the BBC during World War II. After the war, he wrote for the Observer and was literary editor for the Tribune. His best known works are Animal Farm and 1984. His other works include A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, and Coming Up for Air. He died on January 21, 1950 at the age of 46. Keith Gessen was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent, The Nation, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men. GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq and other works. He lives in Brooklyn.