George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 in Motihari in Bengal, India and later studied at Eton College for four years. He was an assistant superintendent with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He left that position after five years and moved to Paris, where he wrote his first two books: Burmese Days and Down and Out in Paris and London. He then moved to Spain to write but decided to join the United Workers Marxist Party Militia. After being decidedly opposed to communism, he served in the British Home Guard and with the Indian Service of the BBC during World War II. After the war, he wrote for the Observer and was literary editor for the Tribune. His best known works are Animal Farm and 1984. His other works include A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, and Coming Up for Air. He died on January 21, 1950 at the age of 46.
A professor of English literature and American studies who has published numerous critical works, Malcolm Bradbury is also a novelist whose protagonists are academics who make muddles of their personal and professional lives. He maintains that his main concern is to explore problems and dilemmas of liberalism and issues of moral responsibility. The targets of Bradbury's satires include intellectual pretension, cultural myopia, and official smugness. His protagonists are largely sympathetic, if comic, failures at mastering their own fates in a world of absurd rules and regulations. His major novels include Eating People Is Wrong (1959), Stepping Westward (1965), and The History Man (1975). This last, a novel of intellectual and political conflict at an English university in the late 1960s, was made into a successful television minidrama. More recent novels include Rates of Exchange (1983) and Cuts (1987).
