George Orwell (1903–1950) was the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair. Orwell was born in India, where his father served in the civil service. Orwell won a scholarship to Eton but was financially unable to continue his education at Oxford or Cambridge. From 1922 to 1927, he worked for the Imperial Police in Burma; the experience provided much of the material for his early work, including the novel Burmese Days (1934) and the title work in the essay collection Shooting an Elephant (1950). For years Orwell worked at ill-paid jobs. He described his experiences with poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). His experiences in the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought on the Republican side and was wounded, are recounted in Homage to Catalonia (1939). An early convert to Socialism, Orwell was angered by the ruthless, authoritarian policies of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. His two best-known novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), are attacks on Soviet-style totalitarianism. Orwell's other works include Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Coming Up for Air (1939), and the posthumously published Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1968).