Animal Farm
By George Orwell
Books - Just The Good Stuff
Animal Farm by George Orwell ranked # 31 on The Modern Library's Top 100 Novels list as selected by its Board Members.
Animal Farm is a satirical novel by George Orwell, ostensibly about a group
of animals who oust the humans from the farm they live on and run it
themselves, only to have it corrupted into a brutal tyranny on its own. It was written during World War II and published in 1945, although it was not widely successful until the late 1950s.
Animal Farm is a thinly veiled critique and satire of Soviet
totalitarianism. Many events in the book are based on events from the
Soviet Union during the Stalin era. (For example, the character
Snowball, who is expelled from the Farm by Napoleon, is clearly
modeled on Trotsky.) George Orwell, though a leftist - he was for
many years a member of the Independent Labour Party - was a critic of
Stalin, and suspicious of Moscow-directed communism after his
experiences in the Spanish Civil War.
The book is an allegory about the events following the revolution in
the Soviet Union, and in particular the rise of Stalinism and the
betrayal of the revolution which basically replaced one dictatorship
for another.
Orwell wrote the book following his experiences during the Spanish
Civil War which are described in another of his books, Homage to
Catalonia.
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