In 1944 Orwell finished writing Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In the book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own, exemplified in their commandment, “All animals are equal.” Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose bondage is even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters. (Their commandment is subsequently amended to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”)

Orwell’s critique of communism and Stalin came at a time when Russia had allied with Britain and the United States against the German dictator Adolf Hitler, and many writers and publishers were hesitant to make any negative commentary about Stalin out of concern it would harm the Allied war effort. Complicating the book’s possible reception were the sympathies that many British leftists had for the communist cause and their disbelief concerning Stalin’s political abuses and purges. Orwell himself had recognized the conundrum, writing in 1947,

My wife and I both saw innocent people [in Spain] being thrown into prison merely because they were suspected of unorthodoxy. Yet on our return to England we found numerous sensible and well-informed observers believing the most fantastic accounts of conspiracy, treachery and sabotage which the press reported from the Moscow trials.

As predicted, at first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for the small masterpiece, but when it appeared in August 1945, Animal Farm made him famous and, for the first time, prosperous.

Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. His use of a simple, almost childlike narrative was intentional, to ensure the book would have a widespread appeal and be easily translated into other languages. Shortly after Animal Farm’s completion, Orwell and his wife welcomed their first and only child. By the time of its publication, however, Orwell had become a widower; Eileen died of heart failure in March 1945 during an operation. About a year later Orwell, his sister Avril, his son, and his housekeeper moved to a remote house on the Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds of Animal Farm and where he spent much of the last few years of his life.

He continued to publish essays in periodicals, producing charming pieces on such topics as junk store treasures as well as commentary on antisemitism in Britain and atomic warfare (Animal Farm was coincidentally released within days after the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima). One of Orwell’s most famous essays, “Politics and the English Language,” appeared in 1946. In it he draws a connection between political orthodoxy and conformity and the debasement of the English language, as exhibited in various examples of evasive, meaningless writing and terminology.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.…Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.

These ideas were rendered into piercing political denunciation in Orwell’s last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book’s hero, the Englishman Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of those states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government, which perpetuates its rule by systematically distorting the truth and continuously rewriting history to suit its own purposes. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but then they are both arrested by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity until he can love only the figure he previously most hated: the apparent leader of the party, Big Brother.

Smith’s surrender to the monstrous brainwashing techniques of his jailers is tragic enough, but the novel gains much of its power from the comprehensive rigor with which it extends the premises of totalitarianism to their logical end: The love of power and domination over others has acquired its perfected expression in the perpetual surveillance and omnipresent dishonesty of an unassailable and irresistible police state under whose rule every human virtue is slowly being suborned and extinguished. Orwell’s warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book’s title and many of its coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,” “doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses.

Orwell wrote the last pages of Nineteen Eighty-four at his home on Jura. He worked between bouts of hospitalization for tuberculosis, and shortly before he died he married Sonia Brownell, an editorial assistant at Horizon. After being transferred to a London hospital in September 1949, Orwell died at age 46 in January 1950.