Monday 17 August 2026 11:20 am

On this day: Animal Farm is published

By: Eliot Wilson

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On this day, 17 August, in 1945, with pro-Soviet sentiment rapidly fading in the UK, George Orwell’s dystopian classic Animal Farm is finally published, writes Eliot Wilson

Friday 17 August 1945. The Second World War was finally over. Two days beforehand, the Emperor of Japan, speaking to his people, admitted that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage”. The previous week, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been obliterated by atomic bombs.

The elaborate and oblique Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War, in classical Japanese, did not say “surrender”, but that is what it meant. Nazi Germany having accepted defeat on 8 May, the deadliest conflict in human history was over.

George Orwell was 42 years old. He had spent the war as a writer, declared medically unfit for military service; he had endured several periods of ill health and had been shot through the throat during the Spanish Civil War. As an author he already had some standing. Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) had been well received, though Orwell himself thought it far from his best work; The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) had proved an satisfyingly horrific depiction of poverty in northern England; the muted response to Homage to Catalonia (1938) perhaps reflected widespread British ambivalence to the Spanish Civil War.

In March 1940, Orwell began writing for the left-wing journal Tribune. Other contributors included........

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