Small 8vo. Original black cloth, gilt-lettered spine; dust jacket (light rubbing to spine).

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. Largely written as a critique not of socialism itself but of the Stalinistic corruption of socialist ideals, Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, in part due to the failure of his previous nonfiction work, Homage to Catalonia, which contained similar themes. In an unpublished preface to the book Orwell wrote of the genesis of Animal Farm, "I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat."

The manuscript was nearly lost in June 1944 when a German bomb destroyed Orwell's London flat. According to his adopted son, Orwell spent hours sifting through the rubble to find it. Originally intending to publish it through Faber & Faber, the book was rejected by director T.S. Eliot on the grounds that criticizing the Soviet Union in the midst of World War II would be unwise. It was eventually published by Secker & Warburg in 1945. Fenwick A.10d.