Spurred on by urgent purpose, George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) began writing the first of two books for which he is most famous, Animal Farm, at the end of 1943 at a critical point during World War Two. The Red Army of the Soviet Union, facing the brunt of Nazi Germany's best fighting forces, was valiantly waging a desperate fight to turn the tide of the war in favor of the Allies, and in doing so, was helping to keep England safe from Hitler. For this, many in the West were grateful. Orwell, however, saw things much differently and he had real reasons for embarking on his beast fable to warn the world. Nevertheless, writing a satire about an ally fighting your enemy during wartime hardly seems like the work of a sane man. But Orwell had good cause and, more than most people, he understood the true nature of Stalin's regime and what it had in store for the West.
Orwell wrote Animal Farm to remind people of the facts not only about Stalin the power-hungry assassin, but about totalitarian regimes everywhere, and how easy it can be for governments to seize power and bend the will of the people to its own purposes.
In late 1943, when Orwell began writing this little book, he was on the sidelines of the war. He had first tried to enter the army but was rejected by his poor health. In spite of his bad health, he was accepted in the Home Guard and worked for a time in the Indian Division of the British Broadcast Service (from which he patterned his experiences and assigned them to one Winston Smith, the protagonist of his other famous book, 1984). Orwell suffered from tuberculosis, which was complicated by a bullet wound to the throat he received in the closing days of the Spanish Civil War. It was during that prelude to the global conflict where Orwell ran directly into the path of the Stalinists.
