Orwell Almost Didn't Get to Write 1984

Today’s politics has me thinking about George Orwell’s 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', the dystopian novel warning about the threat of totalitarianism.  What I did not know was that Orwell volunteered to fight against General Francisco Franco’s attempt to overthrow Spain’s elected government back in nineteen thirty-six. He was seriously wounded which means the book was almost never written. 

George Orwell was the pen name used by Eric Albert Blair, who was part of Europe’s anti-fascist movement and left England to join the POUM party in Spain and fight on their side.  After little training, he was assigned to a hilltop west of Barcelona.  One morning, Orwell was walking in the trench when he describes what happened next: “Suddenly, in the very middle of saying something, I felt – . . . the sensation of being at the center of an explosion…with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up into nothing….”  

He had been shot in the neck, hit by a seven mm bore copper-jacketed Spanish Mauser bullet, from one hundred seventy five yards away.  Orwell survived, thanks to the lead round being encased in copper, keeping the slug from deforming and transferring energy to tissue. It also missed his neck’s major arteries, passing clean through.  

Back in England, Orwell eventually wrote two famous novels of the twentieth century 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.  Sadly, one year later, Orwell died of tuberculosis in nineteen fifty cutting short what might have been a much longer writing career.