Sample Intro

Scott Swenson
Eng 103
Prof E. McCormick
Oct 6, 2010

George Orwell is best known for writing Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four  which are arguably two of the most important and well known socio-political novels of the twentieth century.  Both books have decidedly unhappy, bordering on hopeless endings.  Were these books Orwell's warning to the world, because he was above all a humanist teaming with hope?  Or, were they a criticism of mankind's greed, fear and unevolved ignorance; and the quintessential pessimist's condemnation of mankind?
I will show through a careful historical and literary chronology the make up of the man and the author, and why he wrote these two very relevant novels by showing not only what shaped Orwell's frame of mind  and political philosophies,  but also what was going in his world to shape these ideals.

Born into a "lower-upper-middle-class" late Victorian family; Orwell quickly rejected what could have been an almost assured life of comfort, privilege and security and yet pro-actively rejected this lifestyle and immersed himself with the poor masses.  He wrote both as an observer, but also as one of the downtrodden.  He took great risks for his work, and quite literally suffered for it, because it was human suffering he wrote of as well as giving the poor, uneducated and hopeless a dignity never seen before and seldom seen since.