If you are a student of English or have studied english literature in any detail you will know of George Orwell (the pen name for Eric Arthur Blair). This icon of literature created two great novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, both of which are terrifying visions of dystopia and let’s face it, don’t exactly inspire us (except perhaps, to rebel against “the system”). And speaking of dark, Requiem blog also talk about this, citing the at the BBC.

He was born in India in 1903 in a one-story farmhouse next to an indigo warehouse where his father worked, and shortly afterwards left for England, never to return. This farmhouse is now home to an English teacher (who oddly teaches Shakespeare and Wordsworth but hadn’t heard of Orwell) who only recently learned of it’s famous past. An NGO has allotted $70,000 for the farmhouse’s renovation, a wall, a museum and a stadium to house Orwellian artifacts.

Incidentally Orwell did not just produce those two aforementioned books, he had others: Down and Out in Paris and London (years of self-imposed poverty), A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, The Road to Wigan Pier (a book based on the study of impoverished miners in Wigan), and Homage to Catalonia (based on his experiences fighting for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War).