According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published. The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book. It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world. However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and Orwell’s other major classic, 1984 (of which you can hear the first part below).
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