George Orwell
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Born Eric Arthur Blair
25 June 1903(1903-06-25)
Motihari, Bihar, India
Died 21 January 1950 (aged 46)
London, England
Pen name George Orwell
Occupation Writer; author, journalist
Notable work(s) Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Animal Farm (1945)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Influences
W. Somerset Maugham, Trotsky, Dickens, H.G. Wells, Jack London, Huxley, Henry Fielding, Zola, Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Tom Wintringham, Yevgeny Zamyatin, James Joyce, Upton Sinclair
Influenced
Noam Chomsky, Kurt Vonnegut, Christopher Hitchens, Margaret Atwood, Albert Camus, Ignazio Silone
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903[1][2] - 21 January 1950) was an English journalist, political essayist and novelist who wrote under the pseudonym George Orwell.
His writing is marked by concise descriptions of social conditions and events and a contempt for all types of authority. He is most famous for two novels critical of totalitarianism, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (a satire of Stalinism).
Biography
Early life
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), had a French father who was involved in speculative ventures in Burma where she grew up. She took her son Eric to England when he was one year old and apart from a three-month visit to England in 1907 Richard Blair did not enter his son's life until Eric was nine years old. Eric had two sisters; Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. His great-grandfather Charles Blair had been a wealthy plantation owner in Jamaica and his grandfather a clergyman. Although the gentility passed down the generations, the prosperity did not. Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class".[4]
Education
At six, Eric attended the Anglican parish school in Henley-on-Thames until he was eleven. 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). His tutor was A. S. F. Gow, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge who remained a source of advice later in his career. Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley who spent a short interlude teaching at Eton, but there was no contact between them outside the class-room. 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. Instead, it was decided that Blair should join the Indian Imperial Police. To do this it was necessary to pass an entrance examination. His father had retired to Southwold, Suffolk by this time and Blair was enrolled at a "crammer" there called "Craighurst" where he brushed up on his classics, English and History. Blair passed the exam coming seventh out of twenty-seven.
Burma and the early novels
Blair's grandmother lived at Moulmein, and with family connections in the area, his choice of posting was Burma. In October 1922, he sailed on board SS Herefordshire via the Suez Canal and Ceylon to join the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. A month later he arrived at Rangoon and made the journey to Mandalay the site of the police training school. After a short posting at Maymyo Burma's principal hill station he was posted to the remote area of Mayaungma at the beginning of 1924. His imperial policeman's life gave him considerable responsibilities for a young man of his age while his contemporaries were still at university in England. He was then posted to Twante where as sub-divisional officer he was responsible for the security of some 200,000 people. At the end of 1924 he was promoted to Assistant District Superintendent and posted to Syriam, which was closer to Rangoon and in September 1925 went to Insein the home of the second-largest jail in Burma. He moved to Moulmein where his grandmother lived in April 1926 and at the end of that year went on to Katha. There he contracted Dengue fever in 1927. He was entitled to leave in England in that year and in view of his illness was allowed to go home in July. While on leave in England in 1927, he reappraised his life and resigned from the Indian Imperial Police with the intention of becoming a writer.
The Burma police experience yielded the novel Burmese Days (1934) and the essays "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936). In England, he wrote to family acquaintance, Ruth Pitter and she and a friend found him rooms in Portobello Road (today, a blue plaque commemorates his residence there), where he began writing. From there, he sallied to the Limehouse Causeway (following Jack London's footsteps) spending his first night in a common lodging house, probably George Levy's 'kip'. For a while he "went native" (in his own country), dressing like a tramp, making no concessions to middle class mores and expectations, and recorded his experiences of the low life in "The Spike", his first published essay, and the latter half of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).
He moved to Paris in spring of 1928, where his Aunt Nellie lived (and later died), hoping to earn a freelance writer's living; failure reduced him to menial jobs such as dishwasher in the fashionable Hotel X, on the rue de Rivoli in 1929, all told in Down and Out in Paris and London. The record does not indicate if he had the book in mind as the terminus of those low life experiences.
In later 1929, he returned to England, to his parents' house in Southwold, ill and penniless, where he wrote Burmese Days, and also frequently foraying to tramping in researching a book on the life of society's poorest people. Meanwhile, he regularly contributed to John Middleton Murry's New Adelphi magazine.
He completed Down and Out in Paris and London in 1932; it was published early the next year, while he taught at Frays College, near Hayes, Middlesex. He took the job to escape dire poverty; during this period, he obtained the literary agent services of Leonard Moore. Just before publication of Down and Out in Paris and London, Eric Arthur Blair adopted the nom de plume George Orwell. In a letter to Moore (dated 15 November) he left the choice of pseudonym to him and to publisher Victor Gollancz. Four days later, he wrote to Moore, suggesting these pseudonyms: P. S. Burton (a tramping name), Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways.[5]
As a writer, George Orwell drew upon his life as a teacher and on life in Southwold for the novel A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), written in 1934 at his parents' house after sickness and parental urging forced his foregoing the teaching life. From late 1934 to early 1936 he was a part-time assistant in the Booklover's Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead. Having led a lonely, solitary existence, he wanted to enjoy the company of young writers; Hampstead was an intellectual's town with many houses offering cheap bedsit rooms. Those experiences germinated into the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
The Road to Wigan Pier
In early 1936, Victor Gollancz, of the Left Book Club, commissioned George Orwell to write an account of working class poverty in economically depressed northern England. His account, The Road to Wigan Pier was published in 1937. Orwell did his leg-and-homework as a social reporter: he gained entry to many houses in Wigan to see how people lived; took systematic notes of housing conditions and wages earned; and spent days in the local public library consulting public health records and reports on mine working conditions.
The first half of The Road to Wigan Pier documents his social investigations of Lancashire and Yorkshire. It begins with an evocative description of working life in the coal mines. The second half is a long essay of his upbringing, and the development of his political conscience, including a denunciation of the Left's irresponsible elements. Publisher Gollancz feared the second half would offend Left Book Club readers; he inserted a mollifying preface to the book while Orwell was in Spain.
Soon after researching the The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell married Eileen O'Shaughnessy.
The Spanish Civil War, and Catalonia
In December 1936, Orwell went to Spain as a fighter for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War that was provoked by Francisco Franco's Fascist uprising. In conversation with Philip Mairet, editor of New English Weekly, Orwell said: 'This fascism ... somebody's got to stop it'.[6] To Orwell, liberty and democracy went together, guaranteeing, among other things, the freedom of the artist; the present capitalist civilization was corrupt, but fascism would be morally calamitous.
John McNair (1887-1968), quotes him: 'He then said that this [writing a book] was quite secondary, and [that] his main reason for coming was to fight against Fascism'. Orwell went alone; his wife, Eileen, joined him later. He joined the Independent Labour Party contingent, which consisted of some twenty-five Britons who had joined the militia of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM - Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), a revolutionary communist party. The POUM, and the radical wing of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (Catalonia's dominant left-wing force), believed General Franco could be defeated only if the Republic's working class overthrew capitalism ?- a position at fundamental odds with the Spanish Communist Party, and its allies, which (backed by Soviet arms and aid) argued for a coalition with the bourgeois parties to defeat the fascist Nationalists. After July 1936 there was profound social revolution in Catalonia, Aragón, and wherever the CNT was strong, an egalitarian spirit sympathetically described in Homage to Catalonia.
Fortuitously, Orwell joined the POUM, rather than the Communist International Brigades, but his experiences ?- especially his and Eileen's narrow escape during a Communist purge in Barcelona in June 1937 ?- much increased his sympathies for the POUM, making him a life-long anti-Stalinist and firm believer in what he termed Democratic Socialism, socialism with free debate and free elections.
In combat, Orwell was shot through the neck and nearly killed. At first, he feared his voice would be reduced to a permanent, painful whisper; this was not to be so, though the injury affected his voice, giving it "a strange, compelling quietness".[7] He wrote in Homage to Catalonia that people frequently told him he was lucky to survive, but that he personally thought "it would be even luckier not to be hit at all".
George and Eileen Orwell then lived in Morocco for half a year so he could recover from his wound. In that time, he wrote Coming Up for Air, his last novel before World War II. It is the most English of his novels; alarums of war mingle with images of idyllic Thames-side Edwardian childhood of protagonist George Bowling. The novel is pessimistic; industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of Old England, and there were great, new external threats. In homely terms, Bowling posits the totalitarian hypotheses of Borkenau, Orwell, Silone and Koestler: "Old Hitler's something different. So's Joe Stalin. They aren't like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off and so forth, just for the fun of it ... They're something quite new ?- something that's never been heard of before".
World War II and Animal Farm
After the Spanish ordeal, and writing about it, Orwell's formation ended; his finest writing, best essays, and great fame lay ahead. In 1940, Orwell closed his Wallington house, and he and Eileen moved to No. 18 Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, in the genteel Marylebone neighbourhood near Regent's Park, central London, Orwell supporting himself as a freelance reviewer for the New English Weekly (mainly), Time and Tide, and the New Statesman. Soon after the war began, he joined the Home Guard (and was awarded the "British Campaign Medals/Defence Medal") attending Tom Wintringham's home guard school and championing Wintringham's socialist vision for the Home Guard.
In 1941, Orwell worked for BBC's Eastern Service, supervising Indian broadcasts meant to stimulate India's war participation against the approaching Japanese army. About being a propagandist, he wrote of feeling like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot". Still, he devoted much effort to the opportunity of working closely with the likes of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, and William Empson; the war-time Ministry of Information, at Senate House, University of London, inspired the Ministry of Truth in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell's BBC resignation followed a report confirming his fears about the broadcasts: few Indians listened. He wanted to become a war correspondent, and was impatient to begin working on Animal Farm. Despite the good salary, he resigned from BBC in September 1943, and in November became literary editor of the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune, then edited by Aneurin Bevan and Jon Kimche (Kimche had been Box to Orwell's Cox when they were half-time assistants at the Booklover's Corner book shop in Hampstead, 1934-35). Orwell was on staff until early 1945, writing the regular column "As I Please". Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge had returned from overseas to finish the war in London; the three regularly lunched together at either the Bodega, off the Strand, or the Bourgogne, in Soho, sometimes joined by Julian Symons (then seemingly true disciple to Orwell) and David Astor, editor-owner of The Observer.
In 1944, Orwell finished the anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm published (Britain, 17 August 1945, U.S., 26 August 1946) to critical and popular success. Harcourt Brace Editor Frank Morley went to Britain soon after the war to learn what currently interested readers, clerking a week or so at the Cambridge book shop Bowes and Bowes. The first day, customers continually requested a sold-out book ?- the second impression of Animal Farm; on reading the shop's remaining copy, he went to London and bought the American publishing rights; the royalties were George Orwell's first, proper, adult income.
With Animal Farm at the printer's, with war's end in view, Orwell's desire to be in the thick of the action quickened. David Astor asked him to be the Observer war correspondent reporting the liberation of France and the early occupation of Germany; Orwell quit Tribune.
He and Astor were close; Astor is believed to be the model for the rich publisher in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Orwell strongly influenced Astor's editorial policies. Astor died in 2001 and is buried in the grave beside Orwell's. Orwell never revealed his pen name, keeping his identity secret and thinking his work did not need a revealed author.
Nineteen Eighty-Four and final years
Orwell and his wife adopted a baby boy, Richard Horatio Blair, born in May 1944. Orwell was taken ill again in Cologne in spring 1945. While he was sick there, his wife died in Newcastle during an operation to remove a tumour. She had not told him about this operation due to concerns about the cost and the fact that she thought she would make a speedy recovery.
For the next four years Orwell mixed journalistic work ?- mainly for the Tribune, the Observer and the Manchester Evening News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines ?- with writing his best-known work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. Originally, Orwell was undecided between titling the book The Last Man in Europe and Nineteen Eighty-Four but his publisher, Fredric Warburg, helped him choose. The title was not the year Orwell had initially intended. He first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness), that was changed to 1982 and, later, to 1984.[8]
He wrote much of the novel while living at Barnhill,[9] a remote farmhouse on the island of Jura which lies in the Gulf stream off the west coast of Scotland. It was an abandoned farmhouse with outbuildings near to the northern end of the island, situated at the end of a five-mile (8 km), heavily rutted track from Ardlussa, where the laird, or landowner, Margaret Fletcher lived, and where the paved road, the only one on the island, came to an end.
In 1948, he co-edited a collection entitled British Pamphleteers with Reginald Reynolds.
In 1949, Orwell was approached by a friend, Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, which the Labour government had set up to publish anti-communist propaganda. He gave her a list of 37 writers and artists he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. The list, not published until 2003, consists mainly of journalists (among them the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin) but also includes the actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin. Orwell's motives for handing over the list are unclear, but the most likely explanation is the simplest: that he was helping a friend in a cause ?- anti-Stalinism ?- that they both supported. There is no indication that Orwell abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings ?- or that he believed the writers he named should be suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements. In fact, one of the people on the list, Peter Smollett, the head of the Soviet section in the Ministry of Information, was later (after the opening of KGB archives) proven to be a Soviet agent, recruited by Kim Philby, and "almost certainly the person on whose advice the publisher Jonathan Cape turned down Animal Farm as an unhealthily anti-Soviet text", although Orwell was unaware of this.[10]
In October 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell.[11]
Death
Orwell died in London from tuberculosis, at the age of 46.[12] He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial in accordance with the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: "Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25, 1903, died January 21, 1950"; no mention is made on the gravestone of his more famous pen-name. He had wanted to be buried in the graveyard of the closest church to wherever he happened to die, but the graveyards in central London had no space. Fearing that he might have to be cremated, against his wishes, his widow appealed to his friends to see if any of them knew of a church with space in its graveyard. Orwell's friend David Astor lived in Sutton Courtenay and negotiated with the vicar for Orwell to be buried there, although he had no connection with the village.
Orwell's son, Richard Blair, was raised by an aunt after his father's death. He maintains a low public profile, though he has occasionally given interviews about the few memories he has of his father. Blair worked for many years as an agricultural agent for the British government.
Legacy
Literary criticism
Throughout his life Orwell continually supported himself as a book reviewer, writing works so long and sophisticated they have had an influence on literary criticism. In the celebrated conclusion to his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens one seems to see Orwell himself:
"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry ?- in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."
Rules for writers
In "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell provides six rules for writers:[13]
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Political views
Orwell's political views shifted over time, but he was a man of the political left throughout his life as a writer. In his earlier days he occasionally described himself as a "Tory anarchist". His time in Burma made him a staunch opponent of imperialism, and his experience of poverty while researching Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier turned him into a socialist. "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it," he wrote in 1946.
It was the Spanish Civil War that played the most important part in defining his socialism. Having witnessed the success of the anarcho-syndicalist communities, and the subsequent brutal suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists and other revolutionaries by the Soviet-backed Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined the Independent Labour Party.
At the time, like most other left-wingers in the United Kingdom, he was still opposed to rearmament against Nazi Germany ?- but after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the outbreak of the Second World War, he changed his mind. He left the ILP over its pacifism and adopted a political position of "revolutionary patriotism". He supported the war effort but detected (wrongly as it turned out) a mood that would lead to a revolutionary socialist movement among the British people. "We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary," he wrote in Tribune, the Labour left's weekly, in December 1940.
By 1943, his thinking had moved on. He joined the staff of Tribune as literary editor, and from then until his death was a left-wing (though hardly orthodox) Labour-supporting democratic socialist. He canvassed for the Labour Party in the 1945 general election and was broadly supportive of its actions in office, though he was sharply critical of its timidity on certain key questions and despised the pro-Soviet stance of many Labour left-wingers.
Although he was never either a Trotskyist or an anarchist, he was strongly influenced by the Trotskyist and anarchist critiques of the Soviet regime and by the anarchists' emphasis on individual freedom. He wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier that 'I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.' In typical Orwellian style, he continues to deconstruct his own opinion as 'sentimental nonsense'. He continues 'it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly'. Many of his closest friends in the mid-1940s were part of the small anarchist scene in London.[citation needed]
Orwell had little sympathy with Zionism and opposed the creation of the state of Israel. In 1945, Orwell wrote that "few English people realise that the Palestine issue is partly a colour issue and that an Indian nationalist, for example, would probably side with the Arabs".
While Orwell was concerned that the Palestinian Arabs be treated fairly, he was equally concerned with fairness to Jews in general: writing in the spring of 1945 a long essay titled "Antisemitism in Britain," for the "Contemporary Jewish Record." Antisemitism, Orwell warned, was "on the increase," and was "quite irrational and will not yield to arguments." He thought "the only useful approach" would be a psychological one, to discover "why" antisemites could "swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others." (pp 332-341, As I Please: 1943-1945.) In his magnum opus, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he showed the Party enlisting antisemitic passions in the Two Minute Hates for Goldstein, their archetypal traitor.
Orwell was also a proponent of a federal socialist Europe, a position outlined in his 1947 essay 'Toward European Unity', which first appeared in Partisan Review.
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.
Influence on the English language
Some of Nineteen Eighty-Four's lexicon has entered into the English language.
Orwell expounded on the importance of honest and clear language (and, conversely, on how misleading and vague language can be a tool of political manipulation) in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. The language of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is Newspeak: a thoroughly politicised and obfuscatory language designed to make independent thought impossible by limiting acceptable word choices.
Another phrase is 'Big Brother', or 'Big Brother is watching you'. Today, security cameras are often thought to be modern society's big brother. The current television reality show Big Brother carries that title because of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The same novel spawned the title of another television series, Room 101.
The phrase 'thought police' is also derived from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and might be used to refer to any alleged violation of the right to the free expression of opinion. It is particularly used in contexts where free expression is proclaimed and expected to exist.
Doublethink is a Newspeak term from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is the act of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, fervently believing both.
Variations of the slogan "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", from Animal Farm, are sometimes used to satirise situations where equality exists in theory and rhetoric but not in practice with various idioms. For example, an allegation that rich people are treated more leniently by the courts despite legal equality before the law might be summarised as "all criminals are equal, but some are more equal than others". This appears to echo the phrase Primus inter pares - the Latin for "First amongst equals", which is usually applied to the head of a democratic state.
Although the origins of the term are debatable, Orwell may have been the first to use the term cold war. He used it in an essay titled "You and the Atomic Bomb" on October 19, 1945 in Tribune, he wrote:
"We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications ?- this is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours."
Literary influences
In an autobiographical sketch Orwell sent to the editors of Twentieth Century Authors in 1940, he wrote:
The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.
Elsewhere, Orwell strongly praised the works of Jack London, especially his book The Road. Orwell's investigation of poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier strongly resembles that of Jack London's The People of the Abyss, in which the American journalist disguises himself as an out-of-work sailor in order to investigate the lives of the poor in London.
In the essay "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946) he wrote: "If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them."
Other writers admired by Orwell included Ralph Waldo Emerson, G. K. Chesterton, George Gissing, Graham Greene, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Tobias Smollett, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and Yevgeny Zamyatin.[14] He was both an admirer and a critic of Rudyard Kipling[15],[16] praising Kipling as a gifted writer and a "good bad poet" whose work is "spurious" and "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting," but undeniably seductive and able to speak to certain aspects of reality more effectively than more enlightened authors.[17]
Orwell also publicly defended P. G. Wodehouse against charges of being a Nazi sympathiser; a defence based on Wodehouse's lack of interest in and ignorance of politics.
Intelligence
Predictably, the Special Branch in the UK, the police intelligence group, spied on Orwell during the greater part of his life.[1]. The dossier published by Britain's National Archives mentions that according to one investigator, Orwell's tendency of clothing himself "in Bohemian fashion," revealed that the author was "a Communist":[2]
"This man has advanced Communist views, and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at Communist meetings. He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours."[3]
Conversely, there has been speculation about the extent of Orwell's links to Britain's secret service, MI5, and some have even claimed that he was in the service's employ.[18] The evidence for this claim is contested.
Orwell also had an NKVD file due to his involvement with the POUM militia during the Spanish Civil War.[citation needed]
Personal life
Blair's mother settled at Henley on Thames in 1905 after she bought her son back to England. He was brought up without paternal influence, his father remaining in India for most of his early childhood, in the company of his mother and sisters. His mother's diary for 1905 indicates a lively round of social activity and artistic interests. They moved to Shiplake before World War I, and Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially Jacintha Buddicom whose account "Eric and Us" provides an independent insight into the Blair's childhood. On their first encounter he was standing on his head in a field, claiming "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up". They read and wrote poetry, and dreamt of intellectual adventures. He told her that he might write a book in similar style to that of H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. Simultaneously, he enjoyed shooting, fishing, and birdwatching with Jacintha's brother and sister.[19]
George Orwell and Cyril Connolly were contemporaries at St Cyprian's and at Eton, though they hardly spoke at Eton as they were in separate years. Connolly also provides an account of Blair as a child in Enemies of Promise.[20] They later became friends; Connolly helping a prep school companion by introducing him to London literary circles. At St Cyprian's Blair claimed that he "was made to study like a dog" to earn a scholarship; he alleged that was solely to enhance the school's prestige with parents, so accounting for his lackadaisical approach to studies at Eton. Jacintha Buddicom repudiated Orwell's schoolboy misery described in Such, Such Were the Joys, claiming he was a specially happy child, yet acknowledging he was an aloof and undemonstrative boy who did not need a wide circle of friends. He and she lost touch shortly after Orwell went to Burma, becoming unsympathetic to him because of letters he wrote complaining about his life; she ceased replying.[21]
Whilst living in poor lodgings on Portobello Road on returning from Burma, his family friend recalls:
" That winter was very cold. Orwell had very little money, indeed. I think he must have suffered in that unheated room, after the climate of Burma ... Oh yes, he was already writing. Trying to write that is - it didn't come easily ... To us, at that time, he was a wrong-headed young man who had thrown away a good career, and was vain enough to think he could be an author. But the formidable look was not there for nothing. He had the gift, he had the courage, he had the persistence to go on in spite of failure, sickness, poverty, and opposition, until he became an acknowledged master of English prose. [Ruth Pitter, BBC Overseas Service broadcast, 3 January 1956] "
In The Road to Wigan Pier he writes of tramping and poverty:
" When I thought of poverty, I thought of it in terms of brute starvation. Therefore my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. These were the 'lowest of the low', and these were the people with whom I wanted to get into contact. What I profoundly wanted at that time was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether. "
The business relationship between Orwell and Victor Gollancz, his first publisher, was stiff: for example, in letters, Orwell always addressed him by surname, as "Gollancz". Two items in their relation are of particular interest. The first, Orwell apparently never voiced objection to Gollancz's apologetic preface to A Road to Wigan Pier; the second, he released Orwell from his contract (at Orwell's request) so that Secker & Warburg could publish his fiction. Gollancz's refusal to publish Animal Farm considerably delayed the book's publication. As a Soviet sympathizer, Gollancz was more interested in his non-fiction writing, finding Animal Farm politically too hot.
Eileen O'Shaughnessy was warned off Orwell by friends who warned that she did not know what she was taking on. After her death during a hysterectomy, in a letter to a friend, Orwell refers to her as 'a faithful old stick'; the depth of his love for her remains ambiguous. Eileen's symptoms may partly account for Orwell's infidelities in the war's last years, but, in a letter to a woman to whom he proposed marriage: 'I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her badly, and I think she treated me badly, too, at times, but it was a real marriage, in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work, etc.'[22] Bernard Crick compares them to Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford: 'Certainly with a great writer the writing comes first. One thinks of Thomas Hardy, subtle in his characters, but obtuse to the actual suffering of his first wife.' Nevertheless, Orwell was very lonely after Eileen's death, and desperate for a wife, both as companion for himself and as mother for Richard; he proposed marriage to four women, eventually, Sonia Brownwell accepted.
Bob Edwards, who fought with him in Spain, said: 'He had a phobia against rats. We got used to them. They used to gnaw at our boots during the night, but George just couldn't get used to the presence of rats and one day, late in the evening, he caused us great embarrassment ... he got out his gun and shot it ... the whole front, and both sides, went into action.'
On Sundays, Orwell liked very rare roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding dripping with gravy, and good Yarmouth kippers at high tea. (p.501) ... He liked his tea, as well as his tobacco, strong, sometimes putting twelve spoonfuls into a huge brown teapot requiring both hands to lift.[23]
His wardrobe was famously casual: 'an awful pair of thick corduroy trousers', a pair of thick, grey flannel trousers, a 'rather nice' black corduroy jacket, a shaggy, battered, green-grey Harris tweed jacket, and a 'best suit' of dark-grey-to-black herringbone tweed of old-fashioned cut.[24]
Younger sister, Avril, joined him at Barnhill, Jura, as housekeeper. Like her brother, she was of tough character, and eventually drove away Richard Orwell's nanny, because the house was too small for both women. Orwell also nearly died during an unfortunate boating expedition in that time.
Of Orwell, Bernard Crick writes:
" ... he was both a brave man and one who drove himself hard, for the sake, first, of 'writing' and then more and more for an integrated sense of what he had to write. Orwell was unusually reticent to his friends about his background and his life, his openness was all in print for literary or moral effect; he tried to keep his small circle of good friends well apart - people are still surprised to learn who else at the time he knew; he did not confide in people easily, not talk about his emotions - even to women with whom he was close; he was not fully integrate as a person, not quite comfortable within his own skin, until late in his life - and he was many-faceted, not a simple man at all. "
Shelden noted Orwell's obsessive belief in his failure, and the deep inadequacy haunting him through his career:
" Playing the loser was a form of revenge against the winners, a way of repudiating the corrupt nature of conventional success - the scheming, the greed, the sacrifice of principles. Yet, it was also a form of self-rebuke, a way of keeping one's own pride and ambition in check.[25] "
According to T.R. Fyvel:
" His crucial experience ... was his struggle to turn himself into a writer, one which led through long periods of poverty, failure and humiliation, and about which he has written almost nothing directly. The sweat and agony was less in the slum-life than in the effort to turn the experience into literature.[26]
Carly Simon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Birth name Carly Elisabeth Simon
Born June 25, 1945 (1945-06-25) (age 63)
New York City, U.S.
Origin Riverdale, Bronx, New York
U.S.
Genre(s) Pop, Rock, Pop Standards
Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter, Guitarist
Instrument(s) Vocals, Guitar, Piano
Years active 1970-present
Label(s) Elektra (1971-1979)
Warner Bros. (1980-1984)
Epic (1985-1986)
Arista (1987-2001)
Rhino (2002-2004)
Columbia (2005-2007)
Hear Music (2008-present)
Website CarlySimon.com
Carly Elisabeth Simon (born June 25, 1945) is an American singer/songwriter and musician. She is also an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and two-time Grammy Award winner. Simon was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994.
Early career
Simon's father was Richard L. Simon (co-founder of Simon & Schuster, Inc.), a pianist who often played Chopin and Beethoven at home. Her mother was Andrea Louise Simon (née Heinemann)[1], a biracial (black and white) Jewish civil rights activist and singer.[2] Carly was raised in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, New York City[3] and has two older sisters, Joanna (b. 1940) and Lucy (b. 1943), and a younger brother, Peter Simon (b. 1947). She attended Riverdale Country School. She also briefly attended Sarah Lawrence College, before dropping out to pursue music.
Simon's career began with a short-lived attempt with her sister Lucy as The Simon Sisters. They had a minor hit in 1964 called "Winkin', Blinkin' and Nod" and made three albums together before Lucy left to get married and start a family. Later Simon collaborated with eclectic New York rockers Elephant's Memory for about six months. She also appeared in the 1971 Milos Forman movie Taking Off, playing an auditioning singer and sang "Long Term Physical Effects" which was included in Taking Off, the 1971 soundtrack for the movie.
Her solo music career began in 1971 with the self-titled Carly Simon for Elektra Records. The album contained her breakthrough top-ten hit "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" ?- and was followed quickly by a second album, Anticipation, the title cut from which also received significant airplay.
Simon's breakthrough LP was 1972's No Secrets. The album spawned the hugely successful single "You're So Vain".[4]
In 1973 Simon performed on Lee Clayton's album Lee Clayton co-singing on the song "New York Suite 409" and on Livingston Taylor's album Over The Rainbow singing with both Livingston and James Taylor (who was by then her husband) on the songs "Loving Be My New Horizon" and "Pretty Woman".
She followed No Secrets with the well-received albums Hotcakes (1974) and Playing Possum (1975). In 1974 Simon also performed on Tom Rush's album Ladies Love Outlaws, co-singing with Rush on "No Regrets" and as backup on "Claim On Me". In 1975 Elektra also released her first greatest-hits album The Best of Carly Simon. Another Passenger was released in 1976.
On May 8, 1976, Simon made her only appearance on Saturday Night Live. It was a taped, not live, appearance during which she sang two songs: "Half A Chance" and "You're So Vain". 1976 also saw Simon contribute backup vocals on the song "Peter" on Peter Ivers's album Peter Ivers. In 1977 Simon co-produced Libby Titus's album Libby Titus and sang backup on two songs, "Can This Be Our Love Affair?" and "Darkness 'Til Dawn".
Her sales began moderating with 1975's Playing Possum, and 1976's Another Passenger but in 1977 she had an international hit with "Nobody Does It Better" from the soundtrack to the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. Charting at #2 (#7 in the UK), this was her second-biggest US hit after "You're So Vain". This was followed by the 1978 hit album Boys in the Trees which produced another top ten hit, "You Belong to Me". Also in 1978, Simon and James Taylor sang backup vocals on two songs for Taylor's sister Kate's album Kate Taylor: "Happy Birthday Sweet Darling" and "Jason & Ida". Simon and Taylor also sang backup on three songs on John Hall's debut solo album John Hall, "The Fault", "Good Enough" and "Voyagers". Simon and Taylor would also sing backup on one song, "Power", from Hall's next album, also titled Power (1979).
On November 2, 1978 Simon was the guest vocalist on the song "I Live In The Woods" at a live, four hour concert by Burt Bacharach and the Houston Symphony Orchestra at Jones Hall in Houston, Texas. All the songs at that concert became Bacharach's album Woman, which was released in 1979. That year, shortly after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, from September 19 to September 22, a series of concerts were held at New York's Madison Square Garden sponsored by MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy), a group of musicians against nuclear power, co-founded by John Hall. Always politically active, Simon and James Taylor were part of the concerts which later became a film documentary as well as a live album called No Nukes.
Simon later released her last album for Elektra called Spy, in 1979.
From 1972 to 1979 Simon sang backup vocals on the following James Taylor songs and albums (not counting compilations): "One Man Parade" from 1972's One Man Dog, "Rock 'n' Roll Is Music Now", "Let It All Fall Down", "Me And My Guitar", "Daddy's Baby" and "Ain't No Song" from 1974's Walking Man, "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" from 1975's Gorilla, "Shower the People", "A Junkie's Lament", "Slow Burning Love" and "Family Man" from 1976's In the Pocket, and "B.S.U.R." from 1979's Flag. She also co-wrote with Taylor the song "Terra Nova" on his 1977 album JT. At the end of the song, Simon sang what has come to be known as "Lambert's Cove".
1980s
In 1980, Simon signed with Elektra's parent label Warner Bros. Records. During a show in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania while touring to promote her album, Come Upstairs, Simon collapsed onstage of exhaustion. She subsequently performed considerably less throughout the 1980s. She had a #11 hit with the single, "Jesse", from that album. Simon also contributed the song "Be With Me" to the 1980 album In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record produced by her sister Lucy and Lucy's husband, David Levine. Simon can also be heard on the song "In Harmony" along with other members of the Simon/Taylor families. Carly and Lucy contributed a "Simon Sisters" song called "Maryanne" to the 1982 follow-up album In Harmony 2, also produced by Lucy and her husband. Both albums won the Grammy for Best Album for Children.
Torch (1981) was an album of melancholy standards, reflecting her mood at the time. The Nile Rodgers & Bernard Edwards produced "Why" (1982), from the soundtrack to the 1982 movie Soup For One, was a top 10 hit single in the UK but stalled at #74 in the US. She had another minor UK success with the single "Kissing With Confidence", a song off the 1983 album Dancing For Mental Health by Will Powers (a pseudonym for photographer Lynn Goldsmith). Simon was the uncredited singer of the song on the album. Still, few of her singles in the 1980s rose in the pop charts, although some did better among adult contemporary audiences. In 1983 she made her last album for Warner ?- Hello Big Man. That same year Simon performed on two albums, The Perfect Stranger by Jesse Colin Young (co-singing on the song "Fight For It" with Young) and Wonderland by Nils Lofgren (co-singing on the song "Lonesome Ranger" with Lofgren). By this time her sales were dropping and her contract with Warner Bros ended. She signed with Epic Records in 1985 and made one album for them, Spoiled Girl, which also had lackluster sales. Her contract with Epic ended following the release.
In 1987 Simon signed with Arista Records. Her first album for them, Coming Around Again (1987), was a comeback album exemplified by the hit songs, "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of", "Give Me All Night", "All I Want Is You" and the title track, "Coming Around Again" which wove in and out of the children's song "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and also gave Simon her fourth UK top 10 hit. The album was her first platinum release in nine years. These and older songs were featured in a picturesque HBO concert special set on Martha's Vineyard, where Simon and her band performed live on a pier. Most of these songs were compiled for her 1988 album ?- Greatest Hits Live, her second greatest hits album. This album continued her comeback and was later certified platinum by the RIAA in 1996. Throughout the 1980s, Simon successfully contributed to several film and television scores, including the songs "Something More" for the 1982 movie Love Child, "Someone Waits For You" for the 1984 movie Swing Shift, "All The Love In The World" for the 1985 TV movie Torchlight, "It's Hard To Be Tender" for the 1986 TV miniseries Sins, "If It Wasn't Love" for Nothing In Common (1986), "Two Looking At One" for The Karate Kid, Part II (1986), "Coming Around Again" and "Itsy Bitsy Spider" for Heartburn (1987), and "Let the River Run" for Working Girl (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Song in 1988). The Working Girl soundtrack, which featured more music from Simon, came out in early 1989. In 1987, Simon sang "The Turn Of The Tide" for a Marlo Thomas TV special called "Free to Be . . . A Family". The song was later included on the 1988 album Free To Be . . . A Family. She also wrote a song called "You're Where I Go" as a tribute to Christa McAuliffe, slated to be the first teacher in space, who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. McAuliffe was a Simon fan, and had taken a cassette of her music on board the shuttle.
In 1985, Simon made an appearance (as herself) in the movie "Perfect" in which she famously threw a drink in John Travolta's face. She later appeared in a 1989 episode of the TV series thirtysomething, again as herself. Also in 1989, Simon's first of several children's books, "Amy the Dancing Bear" was published.
1990s
In 1990 Simon released two albums; her second standards album, My Romance and Have You Seen Me Lately, her first album of original songs since 1987. Her second children's book, "The Boy of the Bells" was also published in 1990 and she wrote the score for the 1990 film Postcards From The Edge. In 1991, Simon wrote her third children's book, "The Fisherman's Song" based on the song of the same name from her 1990 album "Have You Seen Me Lately". That same year, Simon performed a duet with Plácido Domingo on the song "The Last Night Of The World" (from the Miss Saigon musical) on Domingo's album The Broadway I Love. A year later Simon wrote the music for the Nora Ephron film "This Is My Life". The soundtrack was released simultaneously with the movie. In 1993 she contributed the song "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" for the film Sleepless In Seattle, and also recorded the same song in combo with "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" with Frank Sinatra for his album Duets.
1993 saw Simon recording a contemporary opera called Romulus Hunt, having been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Association and the Kennedy Center, and published of her fourth children's book, "The Nighttime Chauffeur". She also contributed to Andreas Vollenweider's album Eolian Minstrel. Simon co-wrote the song "Private Fires" with Vollenweider, and was featured vocalist on the song.
1994 she covered "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" for Ken Burns' 1994 film Baseball as well as a recording of "I've Got a Crush On You" for Larry Adler's covers album The Glory of Gershwin. That same year Simon recorded another album of original songs, Letters Never Sent, and contributed a Christmas song, "The Night Before Christmas" to the movie and soundtrack Mixed Nuts. In April 1995, Simon surprised thousands of commuters at New York's Grand Central Station with an unannounced performance which was filmed for a Lifetime Television Special. It was also released on VHS in December of that year. Also in 1995 she put aside years of stage fright long enough to stage an American concert tour in conjunction with Hall & Oates. That same year, Clouds In My Coffee, a boxed set of highlights from her career from 1965 to 1995 was released. On August 30, 1995, Simon made a rare joint appearance with her ex-husband James Taylor for a concert on Martha's Vineyard dubbed "Livestock '95", a benefit for the Martha's Vineyard Agricultural Society, with over 10,000 attending. She performed a duet with Mindy Jostyn on the song "Time, Be On My Side" on Jostyn's 1995 album Five Miles From Hope.
Simon wrote the theme songs to several more movies, including "Two Little Sisters" from the 1996 movie Marvin's Room and "In Two Straight Lines" from the 1998 movie Madeline. 1997 saw the release of Simon's third standards album, Film Noir, as well as her fifth children's book, "Midnight Farm". In 1998, Simon was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy and received chemotherapy. In 1999 The Very Best Of Carly Simon: Nobody Does It Better, a UK-only greatest hits album was released. That year Simon was the featured vocalist for "Your Silver Key" on the album Cosmopoly by Andreas Vollenweider.
During the 1990s the New York press reported on a supposed incident between Simon and the Pretenders' lead singer, Chrissie Hynde, at a Joni Mitchell concert at New York's Fez Club. Some reports have suggested Hynde grabbed Simon around the neck and was punching her, though Simon herself put these rumours to rest on her official website in 2002 [5].
2000s
In 2000 she returned from her illness with The Bedroom Tapes, her first album of original songs in almost six years. In 2001, Simon performed on "Son of a Gun (I Betcha Think This Song Is About You)" with Janet Jackson on Jackson's album All for You. She also contributed back-up vocals on two songs, "Don't Turn Away" and "East Of Eden", for Mindy Jostyn's 2001 album Blue Stories. In November of 2001, "Let the River Run" was used in a public service ad for the United States Postal Service. Entitled "Pride", it was produced to boost public confidence and postal worker morale in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the 2001 Anthrax attacks.
In 2002, Simon recorded a Christmas album, Christmas Is Almost Here, for Rhino Records while in Los Angeles lending support to her son Ben Taylor and his band. That same year, Simon personally chose all the songs for a two disc anthology album titled Anthology for Rhino Records. 2003 saw a re-release of her 2002 Christmas album with two extra tracks and called Christmas Is Almost Here Again on Rhino Records. The two extra tracks, "White Christmas" and "Forgive" were also released as a single. Simon also performed several concerts during the 2004 holiday season at Harlem's Apollo Theater along with BeBe Winans, son Ben and daughter Sally, Rob Thomas, Livingston Taylor, Mindy Jostyn, and Kate Taylor along with other members of the Taylor and Simon family.
Among Simon's recent work were songs for the Disney Winnie the Pooh films Piglet's Big Movie in 2003 and Pooh's Heffalump Movie in 2005. Several of her songs were also featured in the 2004 movie Little Black Book starring Brittany Murphy and Holly Hunter. Simon appears in a cameo role as herself at the end of the movie. 2004 also saw the release of her fourth greatest hits album, Reflections: Carly Simon's Greatest Hits, which peaked at #22 on the Billboard charts that year (#25 in the UK).
In 2005 she released her fourth album of standards, titled Moonlight Serenade. It debuted at number 7 on the Billboard charts, her highest debut since Hotcakes in 1973. To promote Moonlight Serenade, Simon performed two concerts onboard the Queen Mary II which were recorded and released on DVD on November 22, 2005. She also performed in a concert tour in the United States, her first tour in 10 years. Simon also sang a duet, "Angel Of The Darkest Night", with Mindy Jostyn on Jostyn's 2005 album Coming Home which was released several months after Jostyn's death on March 10, 2005. One of Simon's closest friends, Jostyn was married to Jacob Brackman, Simon's long-time friend and musical collaborator. In 2005 she became involved in the legal defense of musician and family friend John Forté with his struggle against a federal incarceration.
In 2006 she recorded her fifth album of covers, a collection of "soothing songs and lullabies" called Into White for Columbia Records. The album featured covers of songs by Cat Stevens, Judy Garland, The Beatles and the Everly Brothers as well as two new original songs. It also features the vocal collaborations of her children, Ben Taylor and Sally Taylor, both accomplished artists. Released January 2, 2007, it became Billboard Magazine's "hot shot debut", entering the chart at number 15.
Simon is also the featured vocalist on four songs on Andreas Vollenweider's holiday album Midnight Clear, released on October 24, 2006: "Midnight Clear", "Suspended Note", "Hymn to the Secret Heart" and "Forgive". "Forgive" is a song Simon wrote for her own holiday album from 2003, Christmas Is Almost Here Again.
In March 2008, it was announced that Simon had signed to the Starbucks label Hear Music, and would be releasing a new album entitled This Kind of Love with them in late April 2008. The album would be her first collection of original songs since 2000's The Bedroom Tapes[6].
On June 19, 2008 Carly & son Ben performed "You're So Vain" together on the Howard Stern Show on Sirius Satellite radio.
Film/Television appearances
Besides music, Simon has also appeared (as herself) in films such as the 1985 film Perfect, and an uncredited appearance in the 2004 film Little Black Book. On television, she appeared (also as herself) in a 1989 episode of Thirtysomething, and voiced a 1995 episode of Frasier entitled "Roz in the Doghouse".
Personal life
Simon married fellow singer-songwriter James Taylor on November 3, 1972.[7] Simon and Taylor had two children, Sarah Maria "Sally" born January 7, 1974 and Benjamin Simon "Ben" Taylor born January 22, 1977, both of whom are musicians and political activists. Simon and Taylor divorced in 1983.[8] In the June 20, 2004 issue of Askmen.com, Simon said that she no longer speaks to her ex-husband James Taylor. "I would say our relationship is non-existent. It's not the way I want it."[9]
Prior to her marriage to Taylor, Simon had been romantically linked to Mick Jagger, Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, and Warren Beatty.
Simon was engaged to musician Russ Kunkel from 1985 to 1986. [10]
Simon married James Hart, a writer, poet, and businessman, on December 23, 1987. The couple divorced in 2007.
Simon underwent a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery for breast cancer in October 1997.
Simon currently lives on Martha's Vineyard and co-owns a store in Vineyard Haven named Midnight Farm, the title of one of her series of children's books from the late 1980s and 1990s.
In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter published on May 1, 2008, Simon was asked about the possibility of a performance in the True Colors Tour. She responded, "The part that I could be involved in is the gay and lesbian part. The part that would be hard for me is to commit to a tour because I'm not very comfortable being onstage. But the part that would be easiest for me would be singing on behalf of all of us. I don't consider myself to be not gay... I've enlarged all of my possibilities. There are a lot of extremely personal stories to tell about that, but we won't go into that right now. Let's just say that it just depends upon who I'm with."
