The Writing Training of George Orwell: Or How Eric Arthur Blair Became George Orwell

Few writers are as fortunate or lucky as Eric Arthur Blair to find their life’s calling when they are just five or six years old. Even luckier are those who stick to it throughout their life. Eric Arthur Blair admits this in so many words in his highly-underrated, Why I Write in a revealing passage that in many ways characterises his body of work.

from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued…. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

What Eric Arthur Blair’s literary corpus also shows is the manner in which he not only overcame his perceived failure but challenged it frontally. And won. Repeatedly.

This essay is the story of how Eric Arthur Blair became George Orwell.

George Orwell is second to none among all the great writers that emerged in the 20th century whatever be the yardstick of evaluation. But he also stood apart and towered over these other greats for a very significant reason: language.

George Orwell valued language as a primary source of our expression of integrity. It was…