T. S. Eliot rejection letter for Animal Farm by George Orwell

Needs more public-spirited pigs.

Below is page 1 of the Letter from T S Eliot (Faber) to George Orwell rejecting Animal Farm, 13 July 1944 | held at The British Library.¹

While Eliot’s letter praises Orwell’s skill as a satirist, comparing him to Jonathan Swift, Eliot expresses his doubts that Orwell’s allegory ‘is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the present time’. (did not want to offend Stalin).

Secker & Walburg did publish Animal Farm in 1945.

Between 1952 and 1957, the CIA, in an operation codenamed Aedinosaur, sent millions of balloons carrying copies of the novel into Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, whose air forces tried to shoot the balloons down.²

(Click link for p. 2) Letter from T S Eliot (Faber) to George Orwell rejecting Animal Farm, 13 July 1944

1. UCL: © Orwell Archive, UCL Library Special Collections.

2. Shakespeare, Nicholas (24 August 2019). "Novel explosives of the Cold War". The Spectator.