Foreword "A Highly Productive Opium District"

[Dave Monroe]

"George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, a small town in Bengal near the Nepalese border, and in the middle of a highly productive opium district.  His father was there working as an agent for the British Opium Department, not arresting growers, but supervising quality control of the product, in which Britain had long enjoyed a monopoly.  A year later, young Eric was back in  England with his mother and sister, and did not return to the region until 1922, as a junior officer of the Indian Imperial Police, in Burmer.  That job paid well, but when he came home on leave in 1927, much to the distress of his father, he decided to chuck it, because what he really wanted to do with his life was be a writer, and that is what he became.  In 1933, with the publication of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, he adopted the pseudonym of George Orwell, which was the name he was known by from then on.  Orwell was one of the many names he had used while tramping around England, and may have been suggested by a river of the same name in Suffolk.   "1984 was Orwell's last book--by the time it came out, in 1949, he had published twelve others, including the highly acclaimed and popular Animal Farm...." ("Foreword," pp. vii-viii)

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