Frances Stonor Saunders, in her fascinating study "The Cultural Cold War," reports that right after Orwell's death the C.I.A. Orwell was fatally ill with pulmonary tuberculosis when he wrote it, and he died in January, 1950. "1984," published four years later, had even greater success. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection it was quickly translated into many languages and distributed, in some countries, by the United States government and it made Orwell, who had spent most of his life scraping by, famous and rich. "Animal Farm" was an instant success in England and the United States. Orwell had trouble finding a publisher, though, and by the time the book finally appeared, in August, 1945, the month of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, the Cold War was already on the horizon. It was a warning against dealing with Stalin and, in the circumstances, a prescient book. "Animal Farm," George Orwell's satire, which became the Cold War "Candide," was finished in 1944, the high point of the Soviet-Western alliance against fascism.
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