The English writer whose name became an adjective for the manipulations of power he spent his life exposing. Shot through the throat fighting in the Spanish Civil War and then hunted by Soviet-backed Communists on his own side, Eric Blair — who wrote as George Orwell — turned that betrayal into a lifelong war on political lying. A democratic socialist to the end, he wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, giving the language Big Brother, Newspeak, and doublethink. His essay on political language argued that vague prose serves tyranny. He died in 1950, and the adjective Orwellian outlived him.
A militiaman lay in a Spanish trench at dawn when a fascist bullet went clean through his throat. He was an English writer who had volunteered to fight, and he should have died on the spot. Instead George Orwell lived, and within months he was running for the French border, not from the fascists but from his own side. The Soviet-backed Communists were arresting and shooting the very anti-fascists he had fought beside. He never forgot it. Out of that betrayal came a hatred of every lie that power tells and forces others to repeat. He poured it into two short books and a plain, hard prose that read like clear glass. He gave us Big Brother, Newspeak, doublethink, and the warning that whoever controls the words controls what can be thought. We still call the manipulation he feared by his name.