In the August 01, 2005 issue of History Today, Robert Pearce cites George Orwell's description of his book Animal Farm, which he was completing in February 1944 (Pearce). Orwell said the book was "a little squib which might amuse you.There's a farm, and the animals get fed up with the way the farmer runs it.so they chuck him out and try to run it for themselves. But they run it just as badly as the farmer and become tyrants like him" (Pearce). Pearce declares that seldom can an author have so misrepresent the passionate intensity invested in his work, or have made a novel seem such a poor publishing proposition (Pearce). In his novel, Animal Farm, Orwell depicts the eternal search for a utopia, and how that search inevitably creates an anti-utopia.

             Indeed, several publisher did reject the work, however their rejection was not because the book was banal, it was because the "little squib" seemed most certainly an attack on Britain's wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and thus was surely to be political dynamite (Pearce). Yet, Frederic Warburg published it in 1945, against opposition from his sales manager, who could not believe that Russia was not a socialist state, and even against opposition from his wife, who was acutely aware of the vast suffering of the Russian people since the Nazi invasion in 1941 (Pearce). In fact, writes Pearce, she threatened to leave Warburg if he published it, however he never once regretted publishing the book, after all the first edition of 4,500 copies sold out within a few days, and by 1973, Animal Farm had sold approximately nine million copies (Pearce). .

             The majority of critics judge Orwell's work as brilliant, and believe that he turned political writing into an art (Pearce). Malcolm Bradbury described Orwell's novel as "the first British postwar novel," embodying a fundamental turning point in "world historical mood" (Pearce). According to Pearce, Animal Farm has a pivotal place in the new era of Cold War literature (Pearce).