George Orwell | Animal Farm, London, 1945, first edition, dust-jacket

George Orwell

Animal Farm. London: Secker & Warburg, 1945

FIRST EDITION, 8vo (185 x 124mm.), original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust-jacket, front free endpaper pasted down, rear free endpaper slightly creased, binding slightly sunned at extremities, a few small chips and minor closed tears at extremities of dust-jacket, but a fine copy 

FIRST EDITION IN A BRIGHT JACKET OF THE AUTHOR'S CLASSIC DYSTOPIAN FABLE, often called the greatest satire in English since Gulliver's Travels. Orwell had finished writing Animal Farm early in 1944 but at least four leading British publishers had turned it down as inopportune while Russia was an ally, so it was not published until 17 August 1945, when the war in Europe had ended. "It brought Orwell instant fame and a huge new and international readership. Harcourt Brace took it after many New York firms had rejected it, and it was a Book of the Month Club selection: it sold 250,000 copies in one year. 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." (Bernard Crick, ODNB)