Animal Farm (75th Anniversary Edition)

75th Anniversary Edition—Includes a New Introduction by Téa Obreht

George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novel—a scathing satire of a downtrodden society’s blind march towards totalitarianism.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned—a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.

When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.

With a foreword by Ann Patchett

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, born in 1903 in colonial India. He attended boarding school in England, and it was there that he first became aware of the hurtful class prejudice that plagued British society, developing an early sensitivity to the uses and abuses of power. Upon graduating from Eton in 1921, Orwell signed on with the Burmese Indian Imperial Police, about which he commented: "In order to hate imperialism, you have got to be part of it." His time in Burma affected him profoundly, and he quit without explanation five years later, announcing that he was to become a writer. Finding himself nearly penniless and taking a job as a dish-washer, the young writer explored the topic of poverty firsthand in his first published book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), followed soon after by Burmese Days (1934), which recalled his time in the Imperial Police. Though his interest in the plight of individuals attempting to transcend their social roles came across in such early comic novels as Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), it wasn't until his impassioned account of the plight of English workers in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) that his new political consciousness fully blossomed. Around this time, he and his new wife joined an antifascist militia at the outbreak of the civil war in Spain, as is recounted in his Homage to Catalonia (1938). Though he is perhaps best known for his brilliant satire Animal Farm (1946) and his classic dystopian novel 1984 (1949) which followed, essay collections such as Inside the Whale (1940) reflected his continuing concern with the very real political and social circumstances of his day. Following the death of his wife in 1945, Orwell contracted tuberculosis, and, soon after his second marriage, died in 1950 at the age of forty-six.