Some information on the author of Animal Farm - George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 to British parents[3] in Motihari, Bengal Presidency, British India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), took him to England when he was one year old. He did not see his father again until 1907, during Richard's three-month visit to England. Eric had two sisters; Marjorie, the elder, and Avril, the younger. He later described his family as "lower-upper-middle class".[4]
Education
At six, Eric attended the Anglican parish school in Henley-on-Thames, where he impressed the teachers. Blair's mother wanted him to have a good public school education, but the family finances were against this unless he could obtain a scholarship. Her brother Charles Limouzin, who lived on the South Coast, recommended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, Sussex. The headmaster undertook to help Blair to win a scholarship, and made a private financial arrangement which allowed Blair's parents to pay only half the normal fees. At the school, Blair formed a life-long friendship with Cyril Connolly (future editor of Horizon magazine, who later published many of his essays). Years later, Blair mordantly recalled the school in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys". However, while there he wrote two poems that were published in his local newspaper, came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington and Eton.
After a term at Wellington College, Blair transferred to Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar (1917–1921), and Aldous Huxley was his French tutor. Later, Blair wrote of having been relatively happy at Eton, because it allowed students much independence. His academic performance reports indicate that he ceased serious work there, and various explanations have been offered for this. His parents could not afford to send him to Oxbridge without another scholarship, and they concluded from the poor results that he would not be able to obtain one.
Work
During the majority of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism, in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living conditions of the poor in northern England, and the class divide generally) and Homage to Catalonia. According to Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest journalist of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt."
Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is often thought to reflect developments in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution; the latter, life under totalitarian rule. Elements in Nineteen Eighty-Four satirize "opium for the masses" found as central-character Winston Smith does (witness the newspapers filled with "sex, sport, and astrology" which the Ministry of Truth peddles to the proles). Nineteen Eighty-Four is often compared to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; both are powerful dystopian novels warning of a future world filled with state control, the former was written later and considers perpetual war preparation in a nuclear age; the latter is more optimistic.