Novel
Animal Farm
George Orwell · 1945
Synopsis
One night, old Major, a prize boar, gathers the animals in the barn and tells them his dream: a world without Man, where the product of their labour would be theirs. He dies in his sleep three nights later. Three pigs draw a doctrine from it, and one day, when the farmer, drunk, has left them without food, the animals break into the store shed and drive out the men. They paint seven commandments on the wall, the last of which says that all animals are equal. That evening, the milk from the milking has disappeared.
Context
Four publishers refused the book. One of them, the poet T. S. Eliot, then one of the directors of his firm, wrote to the author that what was needed was not less communism but pigs more concerned for the public good. Another had accepted the manuscript, then withdrew on the advice of an official of the Ministry of Information, almost certainly a Soviet agent. The book appeared on 17 August 1945, a few days after the atomic bombs, in a print run of four thousand five hundred copies. In the fifties, Radio Free Europe sent copies to the East by balloon, which Czech fighter pilots shot down.
Who it is for
A short tale in the form of an animal fable; the correspondence with Soviet history can be followed without detailed prior knowledge.
Prizes and reception
Translated into French as early as 1947 under another title, it has had six new French translations from 2020 to 2026.
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