Considered perhaps the twentieth century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote fiction, polemical journalism, literary criticism and poetry. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm (1945). This pair of books has sold more than those of any other twentieth-century author. His Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War which cemented his ideology, and his numerous essays on various subjects relating to politics, literature, linguistics, culture and lifestyle, are also widely acclaimed. Orwell's influence on culture, popular and political, continues. Several of his neologisms, along with the term Orwellian, now a byword for any draconian or manipulative social phenomenon or concept inimical to a free society, have entered the vernacular.

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, Bengal Presidency, British India. His great-grandfather Charles Blair had been a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who had married Lady Mary Fane daughter of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland, and he was supported, as an absentee landlord, by a good income from slave plantations in Jamaica. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman. Although the gentility was passed down the generations, the prosperity was not; Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class". His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Burma where her French father was involved in speculative ventures. Eric had two sisters; Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one year old, Ida Blair took him to England.

In 1904, Blair's mother settled at Henley-on-Thames. Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit he did not see his father again until 1912. His mother's diary from 1905 indicates a lively round of social activity and artistic interests. The family moved to Shiplake before World War I, and Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially Jacintha Buddicom. When they first met, he was standing on his head in a field, and on being asked why he said, "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up". Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry and dreamed of becoming famous writers. He told her that he might write a book in similar style to that of H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. During this period, he enjoyed shooting, fishing, and birdwatching with Jacintha’s brother and sister.

At the age of five, Eric Blair was sent as a day-boy to the convent school in Henley-on-Thames which Marjorie attended - a Catholic convent run by French Ursulines, exiled from France after religious education was banned there in 1903. His mother wanted him to have a public school education, but his family was not wealthy enough to afford the fees, making it necessary for him to obtain a scholarship. Ida Blair's brother Charles Limouzin, who lived on the South Coast, was asked to find the best possible school to prepare Eric for higher things ( whose education the family believed was more important than that of his sisters) and he recommended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, Sussex. Limouzin, who was a proficient golfer, came into contact with the school and its headmaster at the Royal Eastbourne Golf Club where he won several competitions in 1903 and 1904. The headmaster undertook to help Blair to win the scholarship, and made a private financial arrangement which allowed Blair's parents to pay only half the normal fees. Blair hated the school and many years later based his posthumously published essay Such, Such Were the Joys on his time there. At St. Cyprian's, Blair first met Cyril Connolly, who himself became a noted writer and who, as the editor of Horizon magazine, published many of Orwell's essays. While at the school Blair wrote two poems that were published in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, the local newspaper, came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington College and Eton College, two distinctive English independent boarding schools.

After Blair spent a term at Wellington in 1917, a place became available for him as a King's Scholar at Eton which he took up, and remained at Eton until 1921. His tutor was A. S. F. Gow, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge who remained a source of advice later in his career. Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley who spent a short interlude teaching at Eton, but outside the classroom there was no contact between them. Cyril Connolly followed Blair to Eton, but because they were in separate years they did not associate with each other. Blair's academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his academic studies, but during his time he worked with Roger Mynors to produce a college magazine and participated in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to university without another scholarship, and they concluded from his poor results that he would not be able to obtain one. However Stephen Runciman, who was a close contemporary, noted that he had a romantic idea about the East and, for whatever reason, it was decided that Blair should join the Indian Imperial Police. To do this, it was necessary to pass an entrance examination. His father had retired to Southwold, Suffolk by this time and Blair was enrolled at a "crammer" there called "Craighurst" where he brushed up on his classics, English and History. Blair passed the exam, coming seventh out of twenty-seven.

Blair's grandmother lived at Moulmein, and with family connections in the area, his choice of posting was Burma. In October 1922 he sailed on board S.S. Herefordshire via the Suez Canal and Ceylon to join the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. A month later, he arrived at Rangoon and made the journey to Mandalay, the site of the police training school. After a short posting at Maymyo, Burma's principal hill station, he was posted to the frontier outpost of Myaungmya in the Irrawaddy Delta at the beginning of 1924.

His imperial policeman's life gave him considerable responsibilities for a young man, while his contemporaries were still at university in England. When he was posted to Twante as a sub-divisional officer, he was responsible for the security of some 200,000 people. At the end of 1924 he was promoted to Assistant District Superintendent and posted to Syriam, which was closer to Rangoon. In September 1925 he went to Insein, the home of the second largest jail in Burma. In Insein he had "long talks on every conceivable subject" with a journalist friend, Elisa Maria Langford-Rae (later the wife of Kazi Lhendup Dorjee), who noted his "sense of utter fairness in minutest details".

In April 1926 he moved to Moulmein, where his grandmother lived. At the end of that year, he went to Katha, where he contracted Dengue fever in 1927. He was entitled to leave in England that year, and in view of his illness, was allowed to go home in July. While on leave in England in 1927, he reappraised his life and resigned from the Indian Imperial Police with the intention of becoming a writer. His Burma police experience yielded the novel Burmese Days (1934) and the essays "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936).

In England, he settled back in the family home at Southwold, renewing acquaintance with local friends and attending an Old Etonian dinner. He visited his old tutor Gow at Cambridge for advice on becoming a writer, and as a result he decided to move to London. Ruth Pitter, a family acquaintance, helped him find lodgings and by the end of 1927 he had moved into rooms in Portobello Road (a blue plaque commemorates his residence there). Pitter took a vague interest in his writing as he set out to collect literary material on a social class as different from his own as were the natives of Burma.

Following the precedent of Jack London, whom he admired, he started his exploratory expeditions slumming in the poorer parts of London. On his first outing he set out to Limehouse Causeway spending his first night in a common lodging house, possibly George Levy's 'kip'. For a while he "went native" in his own country, dressing like a tramp and making no concessions to middle class mores and expectations; he recorded his experiences of the low life for later use in "The Spike", his first published essay, and the latter half of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).