Animal Farm
Book1 list appearance
George Orwell completed writing Animal Farm in 1944 as a political fable critiquing the 1917 Russian Revolution and Joseph Stalin's betrayal of its egalitarian ideals. Orwell struggled to find a publisher in 1944 because the Soviet Union was a wartime British ally against Nazi Germany; even T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber rejected the manuscript (letter catalogued at ORWELL/H/1/63/2). As the wartime alliance began to fracture in 1945, Secker and Warburg published Animal Farm on August 17, 1945. Framed as a deceptively simple barnyard fable, the story depicts animals overthrowing farmer Mr. Jones (Tsar Nicholas II) to establish "Animalism" under the Seven Commandments. The novella maps directly onto Soviet history: Old Major (Karl Marx/Vladimir Lenin), Napoleon (Joseph Stalin), Snowball (Leon Trotsky), Boxer the cart horse (the proletariat), and Squealer (communist propaganda). Its central rhetorical mechanism is the gradual, gaslighting revision of the foundational commandment from "All animals are equal" to "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
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Structured Facts & Specifications
Verified highlightsAuthor
George Orwell (pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, 1903–1950)
Node Type
Book
Entity ID
34
Canonical Name
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
First Publication
August 17, 1945 (Secker and Warburg, London)
Schema.org / Domain Tags
schema:Book, schema:CreativeWork, literature:political-satire, allegory:russian-revolution, dystopian-fiction
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