Today is the anniversary of Eric Blair's birthday (a.k.a. George Orwell) in 1903

from Writer's Almanac (G. Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio):

Today (June 25) is the birthday of novelist and essayist George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal, India (1903). He didn't care for his birth name; he found "Eric" too Norse and "Blair" too Scottish. When he began writing in earnest, he adopted what he felt was a solidly English name; his surname comes from the River Orwell in East Anglia.
His father was a British civil servant, and the family was, in Orwell's words, "upper lower middle class"; nevertheless, the boy went to several exclusive boarding schools, including Eton, on a scholarship. He didn't enjoy the experience, feeling alienated from his well-to-do classmates, and chose not to go on to Oxford or Cambridge. He became a military policeman instead, serving in Burma, where he came to hate imperialism, totalitarianism, and the class system. He returned to England a literary and political rebel. He called himself an anarchist for many years, and later a socialist who was nonetheless critical of the existing socialist movement.
He's most famous for his anti-communist and dystopian novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but he was also a master of literary nonfiction, using deceptively straightforward prose to describe moments of personal insight. His 1931 essay "A Hanging" describes his role in the execution of a prisoner in Burma:
"At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. ... He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone -- one mind less, one world less."
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) was a retelling of time he spent among the poor in England and Europe; The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) was both a pro- and anti-socialist look at unemployed miners in the north of England. His posthumously published essay "Such, Such Were the Joys ..." (1952) recalled his boarding school days and the classism he encountered there.
He also wrote an essay decrying the abuse of language by politicians and the media, called "Politics and the English Language" (1946). In it, he includes five rules for effective written communication:
   (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
   (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
   (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.   (iv) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
   (v) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.