A biting indictment of dictatorship written during the Second World War and published in 1945, Animal Farm is perhaps the most celebrated twentieth-century English satire after the same writer’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell is one of the very few satirists to be compared in power, artistry and moral authority with Jonathan Swift; in Animal Farm his spare prose and the logic of his dark comedy emphasize the stark message of man’s inhumanity to man and beast’s to beast.