'Animal Farm' at 80

On August 17, 1945—just two days after V-J Day in Asia and fewer than two weeks after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—George Orwell published what he modestly called his “little squib”: Animal Farm. It was a 30,000-word bombshell that detonated on the cultural front with an impact of atomic proportions. It marked the first major literary salvo of the Cold War and initiated the serious unraveling of the Soviet myth in the Western imagination.