The Connell Short Guide to George Orwell's Animal Farm

Malcolm Bradbury has called Animal Farm the most important work of fictional political satire to be written in twentieth-century Britain. When it was first published in in 1945, it caused a sensation. More than a million copies were sold in the 1940s and 1950s alone, and it quickly became a classic of 20th century literature. No two books by a single author have sold more copies than Animal Farm and the Orwell novel which shortly followed it, Nineteen Eighty-Four. In this short guide Zachary Seager looks at why Orwell struggled to have it published and what makes his devastating attack on Soviet communism so popular, so special, and so controversial.