Animal Farm. New York: Harcourt, 1946. First American Edition. Black cloth boards, title lettered in gilt along spine, in publisher’s dust jacket. Jacket worn along spine with a few closed-tears, otherwise a nice bright copy.

Regarded as Orwell’s masterpiece and one of the most skillful allegorical novels of the twentieth century, which the author said ‘was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.’

The first British edition finally came out after the war had ended, in August 1945, and the American edition followed a year later. The book was an instant critical and commercial success.