George Orwell, born Eric Blair in India in 1903, the third generation of colonial service stock, joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922 after leaving school in England. Rejecting the racial and cultural barriers of colonial rule he encountered there, he returned to England to become a writer. He became allied to leftist and labour causes and, based on personal participation, documented the life and work of the underprivileged and working classes in England and Paris. He also fought with the leftist alliance in the Spanish Civil War against Franco's army revolt against the Republican Government. Although a fine essayist and master of English prose, he is best known for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, two political satires on the Soviet system and totalitarianism respectively. These brought him fame and financial security shortly before his death of tuberculosis at the age of 47, after a life of recurrent ill health and economic hardship.