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Animal Farm: sixty years on: Robert Pearce gives a historian's-eye view of George Orwell's classic novel.

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From: History Today
Date: 20050801
Author:Pearce, Robert

A 'LITTLE SQUIB which might amuse you': so George Orwell dismissed the book he was completing in February 1944. 'There's a farm, and the animals get fed up with the way the farmer runs it,' he wrote, summarizing the plot, 'so they chuck him out and try to run it for themselves. But they run it just as badly as the farmer and become tyrants like him.' Seldom can an author have so misrepresented the passionate intensity invested in his work, or have made a novel seem such a poor publishing proposition.

Several publishers duly rejected the work, but not because it was banal. The ...

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