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"ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS"
"No parable written since Gulliver's Travels is equal in profundity and mordant satire to Animal Farm." -Arthur Koestler FIRST EDITION of Orwell's classic, one of the most celebrated satires in the English language. "Early in 1944 Orwell finished writing Animal Farm but at least four leading publishers (Gollancz, T. S. Eliot for Faber, Jonathan Cape, and Collins) turned it down as inopportune while Russia was an ally. It was not published until shortly after the end of the war in Europe. Several critics called it the greatest satire in the English language since Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and it brought Orwell instant fame and a huge new and international readership... It was translated into every major language, including some in which it could only be read in smuggled or in samizdat versions. It has survived the late twentieth-century collapse of Soviet power not only because of its plain style—Orwell believed passionately and politically that no meaningful idea was too difficult to be explained in simple terms to ordinary people—but because the satire can touch all power-hungry regimes, left or right, and even some rulers who can be hard to pin down in either category" (DNB). London, Secker & Warburg, 1945. Octavo, original green cloth, original dust jacket. Small owner's signature on front free endpaper. Book near-fine, dust jacket with a few spots of soiling and a little wear to spine. An exceptionally nice copy of a notoriously difficult book to find in good condition. $7500. |
