Animal Farm has become the classic political fable of the twentieth century. Published in 1945, it was, as Orwell himself said, "the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole". Written in a form akin to the traditional beast fable, it tells the story of a revolution among animals, led by the pigs, and their subsequent takeover of the farm. Soon, however, the purity of their original aims is corrupted by internal power-struggles and deceit into dictatorship.
If this Swiftian satire has a moral, it is a bleakly ironic one... the animals' Utopia disintegrates into an oppressive, despotic regime, manipulated by the pigs' accomplished propaganda, until the slogans that heralded the new freedom are perverted into blatant contradiction.

Animal Farm has become the classic political fable of the twentieth century. Published in 1945, it was, as Orwell himself said, "the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole". Written in a form akin to the traditional beast fable, it tells the story of a revolution among animals, led by the pigs, and their subsequent takeover of the farm. Soon, however, the purity of their original aims is corrupted by internal power-struggles and deceit into dictatorship.
If this Swiftian satire has a moral, it is a bleakly ironic one... the animals' Utopia disintegrates into an oppressive, despotic regime, manipulated by the pigs' accomplished propaganda, until the slogans that heralded the new freedom are perverted into blatant contradiction.