It's the birthday of the man who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell, born in a small village in India (1903). As a journalist, he traveled to Spain to write about people fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He signed up to fight against the Fascists. He went to the front, saw little fighting, and when he got his first chance to shoot a Fascist, Orwell could not bring himself to do it because the man was running out of an outhouse pulling up his pants. Orwell wrote, "I had come here to shoot at 'Fascists,' but a man who is holding up his pants is not a 'Fascist.' He is a fellow creature."

The experience of the Spanish Civil War changed Orwell's life. He came to believe that it was neither Fascism nor Communism that was evil, but simply idealism taken to any extreme. He became one of the first writers on the left to speak out against Stalin and Communism, and wrote Animal Farm as a political allegory about the Communist revolution.

He spent the last years of his life writing 1984. He died a few months after it was published. It has since been translated into 62 languages and has sold more than ten million copies.

It was George Orwell who said, "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention."

(from "The Writer's Almanac" on National Public Radio in the U.S.)