George Orwell was the pseudonym of English author Eric Arthur Blair, born in 1903 in Bengal, where his father worked for the Opium Department of the Government of India. His first book publication was Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) dealing with his experience of poverty and homelessness in those two cities, which Orwell researched by living as an indigent for some months. For the same publisher he produced The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which …showed first 75 words of 838 total…

…showed last 75 words of 838 total…for ourselves, Orwell then spent much of his last years drawing up and distributing lists of those of his fellow writers he considered to be Soviet pawns. One might wish to cut a dying man some slack over such McCarthyist behaviour, but, even so, for a long term champion of freedom and humanity to act thus suggests that the danger of sliding into "Fascist ways of thought", as he termed them, must be real indeed.