Animal Farm

1945 (published) ; George Orwell

Animal Farm is an allegorical and dystopian novel by George Orwell, first published in England on August 17, 1945. According to Orwell, the book reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist Era of the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, an attitude critically shaped by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. The Soviet Union, he believed, became a brutal dictatorship, built upon a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as a satirical tale against Stalin, and in his essay “Why I Write” (1946), wrote Animal Farm was the first book he tried with full consciousness of what he was doing “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.”

The original title was Animal Farm: A Fairy Story; U.S. publishers dropped the subtitle when they published it in 1946, and only one of the translations during Orwell’s lifetime kept it. Other titular variations include subtitles such as “A Satire” and “A Contemporary Satire.”

Orwell wrote the book between November 1943-February 1944, when the United Kingdom shared wartime alliance with the Soviet Union and the British people and intellectuals held Stalin in high esteem, a phenomenon Orwell hated. The manuscript was initially rejected by a number of British and American publishers, including one of Orwell’s own, Victor Gollancz, delaying its publication. It became a great commercial success when it did appear partly because international relations were transformed as the wartime alliance gave way to the Cold War.

TIME Magazine chose the book as one of the 100 Best English-Language Novels (1923-2005); it also featured at No. 31 on the Modern Library List of Best Twentieth Century Novels. It won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996, and is also included in the Great Books of the Western World Selection.