Animal Farm

Animal Farm was written by George Orwell between 1943 and 1944 and published in England on 17 August 1945, with the American edition following from Harcourt, Brace in 1946. Orwell was a socialist and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and he wrote the book as a fable about the course of the Russian Revolution, with each of the animals standing for a faction or a figure. Publishers were reluctant to take it while Britain and the Soviet Union were allies, and more than one rejected the manuscript before Secker & Warburg printed it.

The farm runs on an argument about language. The seven commandments are painted on the wall, then repainted in the night; the pigs move into the farmhouse, sell the hens' eggs, take the milk, and explain each decision in a way that leaves the older animals feeling that they have simply misremembered the past. Boxer, the carthorse who works hardest and believes most completely, is the one the reader follows through it. Napoleon and Snowball begin as partners with different opinions and end as something else, and the dogs that arrive with the second of them settle the argument.

The novella is short, plain and organised so that a reader can follow the politics without a guide. Its subtitle, A Fairy Story, was dropped from some later editions. The book was written while Britain and the Soviet Union were allies, which is why publishers hesitated over it, and its method is the gap between what the pigs announce and what the working animals can see happening around them. Film and graphic adaptations followed in the decades afterwards, and the line about all animals being equal has been quoted back at governments ever since.