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Today, Animal Farm is a classic. (In fact, we have a sneaking suspicion that you're here because you're being needed to read it.) However, when Orwell wrote the book in 1943-44, he could barely find a publisher. In reality, no one took him up on it before 1945, and even then readers were not too keen on it. You see, Animal Farm takes a blow in the Soviet Union, especially its leader Josef Stalin--however, the Soviet Union was an ally in the U.

S.'s fight against Nazi Germany at World War II. Criticism of Stalin wasn't prohibited in wartime British media, but it wasn't just supported, either. Stalin may have been bad, but Hitler was worse. When publishing house Faber & Faber refused Orwell, an editor pointed out that it was simply distasteful to depict Stalin as "a pig."

However, Orwell was no knee-jerk anticommunist. In fact, he was a socialist, a very simple word to get a complex and varied set of beliefs. Let's just say that socialists believe that the way of production (like factories or businesses) should be controlled by the workers for the benefit of everyone, rather than controlled by a very small subset of owners for their own profit. In other words, Wal-Mart ought to be owned by Wal-Mart workers, rather than by the Walton family. There are co-ops and employee-owned business today that function in only that way.)

Because communism is an intense form of socialism, Orwell actually fought alongside communists in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s. But Orwell quickly realized that the communists he was fighting for might be just as totalitarian and oppressive as the fascists.

In fact, his time in Spain made him realize "how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries" (origin). And that's where Animal Farm comes in: it shows Stalin's version of communism as the specific opposite of socialist values--as a brutal, oppressive, and unequal regime. Not that he watched Western leaders as much better. Brutal, drunken humans represent western leaders in Animal Farm--and the animals are more afraid of the people regaining control than they have the Stalinist pigs.

Orwell satirizes all political tyranny. He's just generous like this.

Okay. But the reason why animals? Why not just write an article? (Orwell was fairly great in the ol' essay-writing gig, after all.) Or why not write a novel with real individuals, such as his 1949 political satire Nineteen Eighty-Four?

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