Animal Farm

The animals of Manor Farm, inspired by the elderly boar Old Major's dying vision of a world without human masters, rise up and drive out the drunken farmer Mr. Jones, renaming the property Animal Farm and adopting seven commandments built around the principle that all animals are equal. Two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, lead the new order, disagreeing sharply over Snowball's plan to build a windmill that will lighten every animal's workload; Napoleon settles the argument by setting his private pack of dogs, raised in secret from puppies, on Snowball and driving him off the farm for good. From there Napoleon rules increasingly like the man he replaced, trading with neighboring farms, moving into the farmhouse, sleeping in a bed, and using the pig Squealer to explain away every broken commandment as somehow always having permitted exactly what Napoleon now wants. The other animals, especially the devoted, overworked cart horse Boxer, keep believing the revolution's promises even as their own lives grow harder, and when Boxer finally collapses from exhaustion the pigs sell him to a knacker for cash rather than let him retire, telling the others a comforting lie about a hospital instead. The novel ends years later with the farm's remaining animals looking through a farmhouse window at a dinner party of pigs and neighboring human farmers, drinking and bargaining together as equals, and finding, as they look from pig to man and back again, that they can no longer tell the two apart. The seventh commandment, once all animals are equal, has by then been quietly repainted to read that some animals are more equal than others.

Orwell writes the whole book as a plain, almost childlike fable, and that simplicity is exactly what makes its cruelty land as hard as it does; nothing about the prose signals irony, so each betrayal arrives with the same flat, reasonable tone as everything the pigs said before it. It reads very quickly, in short chapters closer to a folk tale than a novel, and its brevity is part of why it has stayed on required reading lists for generations who might never have picked up a longer political allegory.

Orwell wrote the manuscript between November 1943 and February 1944, during Britain's wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, and multiple publishers turned it down as too politically awkward to print against an ally. Victor Gollancz, Orwell's usual publisher, refused it outright, and T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber rejected it too, writing that its point of view, which he took to be generally Trotskyite, was not one he found convincing, and that what was needed was not more communism but more public spirited pigs. Jonathan Cape briefly agreed to publish it before backing out after an official at the wartime Ministry of Information warned against it, an official later revealed to have been a Soviet intelligence source. A German bomb destroyed part of Orwell's London flat in June 1944 while the only finished manuscript was still inside, though it survived the blast undamaged.