Why Orwell wrote Animal Farm

In 1936, Orwell was also called upon to do a report on the Spanish Civil War. He joined the International Brigade, a group of Republican military units who travelled to Spain to fight the Spanish Nationalist forces. In 1937, George Orwell joined the POUM, another Republican army fighting the Fascists. Orwell was badly injured by a sniper bullet in the throat while in battle but he recovered, although, he was declared unfit for service. Whilst he was battling the opposition, he didn’t understand why the two sides were attacking each other because they had pretty much the same ideologies. Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War gave rise to Homage to Catalonia (1938). In August 1941, Orwell finally obtained "war work" when he was taken on full time by the BBC's Eastern Service. He supervised cultural broadcasts to India in the context of propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to destabilize Imperial links. George Orwell’s awareness of the simplicity that Hitler acquired over the population staggered him and was one of the main contributions to Animal Farm.

George Orwell wrote the manuscript in 1943 and 1944 following his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in his 1938 Homage to Catalonia. In the foreword 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. Orwell describes here 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.”