Animal Farm

If you are looking for allegorical literature to understand today’s politics, Animal Farm is a great guidepost. * Observer *The Cold War Candide … Virtually every detail in Animal Farm allegorizes some incident in that history. * New Yorker *Animal Farm is moving, bitter and a warning from history … [it] is one of the greatest socio-political works of all time. * Fantasy Book Review *Animal Farm is a biting satire of totalitarianism … Orwell is unnervingly precise in the way he depicts each step on the road from revolution to tyranny. * Common Sense Media *

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India where his father was a civil servant. After studying at Eton, he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma for several years which inspired his first novel, Burmese Days. After two years in Paris, he returned to England to work as a teacher and then in a bookshop. In 1936 he travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, where he was badly wounded. During the Second World War he worked for the BBC. A prolific journalist and essayist, Orwell wrote some of the most influential books in English literature, including the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four and his political allegory Animal Farm. He died from tuberculosis in 1950.