What is the background of the author of the novel 1984?

Eric Arthur Blair (who wrote 1984 and his other works under the pen name George Orwell) was a 19th-century English author and journalist. Blair was born in India. He later moved to Europe to become a writer, and he began to write under the name "George Orwell." He was unsuccessful at first, and he began to develop anarchist political tendencies. Orwell's political beliefs eventually evolved into democratic socialism, and his beliefs led him to fight in the Spanish Revolution against the nationalist forces of Francisco Franco (Orwell wrote about the conflict in his Homage to Catalonia).

After the war, Orwell continued writing. He fiercely apposed the Stalinist regime in Soviet Russia--believing it had forsaken the ideals of the Russian Revolution--and he wrote his widely-popular Animal Farm to satirize and attack it. In 1948, he published his most famous work, the dystopian 1984. Unfortunately, Orwell's health began to falter; he died in 1950 from tuberculosis.