Animal Farm - Origin

Origin

George Orwell wrote the manuscript in 1943 and 1944 subsequent to his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in his 1938 Homage to Catalonia. In the preface of a 1947 Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, he explained how escaping the communist purges in Spain taught him "how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries." This motivated Orwell to expose and strongly condemn what he saw as the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals.

Immediately prior to his writing, the Ministry of Information had put out a booklet for propagandists with instructions on how to quell ideological fears of the Soviet Union, which included directions to claim that the Red Terror was a figment of Nazi imagination, and Orwell had quit the BBC.

In that preface, Orwell also described what gave him the idea of setting the book on a farm:

...I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.