Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-utopian novella by English author George Orwell that critiques the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent betrayal of its ideals by Joseph Stalin. The book is written as a “simple” allegorical narrative about a group of barnyard animals who overthrow their human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and set up a dictatorship even more oppressive than that of their former human masters. The story’s theme illustrates how power can corrupt and one system of oppression can be replaced by another.
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