<P> In April 1926 he moved to Moulmein, where his maternal grandmother lived . At the end of that year, he was assigned to Katha in Upper Burma, where he contracted dengue fever in 1927 . Entitled to a leave in England that year, he was allowed to return in July due to his illness . While on leave in England and on holiday with his family in Cornwall in September 1927, he reappraised his life . Deciding against returning to Burma, he resigned from the Indian Imperial Police to become a writer . He drew on his experiences in the Burma police for the novel Burmese Days (1934) and the essays "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936). </P> <P> In England, he settled back in the family home at Southwold, renewing acquaintance with local friends and attending an Old Etonian dinner . He visited his old tutor Gow at Cambridge for advice on becoming a writer . In 1927 he moved to London . Ruth Pitter, a family acquaintance, helped him find lodgings, and by the end of 1927 he had moved into rooms in Portobello Road; a blue plaque commemorates his residence there . Pitter's involvement in the move "would have lent it a reassuring respectability in Mrs Blair's eyes ." Pitter had a sympathetic interest in Blair's writing, pointed out weaknesses in his poetry, and advised him to write about what he knew . In fact he decided to write of "certain aspects of the present that he set out to know" and "ventured into the East End of London--the first of the occasional sorties he would make to discover for himself the world of poverty and the down - and - outers who inhabit it . He had found a subject . These sorties, explorations, expeditions, tours or immersions were made intermittently over a period of five years ." </P> <P> In imitation of Jack London, whose writing he admired (particularly The People of the Abyss), Blair started to explore the poorer parts of London . On his first outing he set out to Limehouse Causeway, spending his first night in a common lodging house, possibly George Levy's' kip' . For a while he "went native" in his own country, dressing like a tramp, adopting the name P.S. Burton and making no concessions to middle - class mores and expectations; he recorded his experiences of the low life for use in "The Spike", his first published essay in English, and in the second half of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). </P> <P> In early 1928 he moved to Paris . He lived in the rue du Pot de Fer, a working class district in the 5th Arrondissement . His aunt Nellie Limouzin also lived in Paris and gave him social and, when necessary, financial support . He began to write novels, including an early version of Burmese Days, but nothing else survives from that period . He was more successful as a journalist and published articles in Monde, a political / literary journal edited by Henri Barbusse (his first article as a professional writer, "La Censure en Angleterre", appeared in that journal on 6 October 1928); G.K.'s Weekly, where his first article to appear in England, "A Farthing Newspaper", was printed on 29 December 1928; and Le Progrès Civique (founded by the left - wing coalition Le Cartel des Gauches). Three pieces appeared in successive weeks in Le Progrès Civique: discussing unemployment, a day in the life of a tramp, and the beggars of London, respectively . "In one or another of its destructive forms, poverty was to become his obsessive subject--at the heart of almost everything he wrote until Homage to Catalonia ." </P>

When did george orwell write his first book