Animal Farm by ORWELL, GEORGE

Original cloth and black dust jacket. Very minor wear to price-clipped jacket. Near fine. Cloth case.

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. The American edition omits the sub-title "A Fairy Story." This is the most famous political satire of the 20th century. "Animal Farm, which owes something to Swift and Defoe, is [Orwell's] masterpiece" (Connolly 93)

In his essay "Why I Write," Orwell wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he attempted consciously "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole." The allegorical novel critiques the events leading up to the 1917 Revolution and the Stalinist era. In the preface of a 1947 Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, he explained how escaping the communist purges in Spain in the 1930s taught him "how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries."

Orwell wrote Animal Farm between November 1943 and February 1944, but he had difficulty securing a publisher because of the wartime alliance with the USSR. With the end of the war it became clear that the Soviet Union would be the principal adversary of the West, and Orwell convinced Secker and Warburg to publish the book. The book remained on the forbidden list in the USSR until 1989.

Orwell wrote in a letter in 1946, "Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution … [and] that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters … revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert."

Connolly, The Modern Movement 93 (London edition).