Animal Farm Was Rejected by T.S. Eliot
Quick answer: Animal Farm was rejected by four publishers, including T.S. Eliot at Faber. The documented story of Orwell's hardest year and why every no was about politics.
In late June 1944 a V-1 flying bomb wrecked George Orwell's flat in Mortimer Crescent, London. In the days afterwards he went back and picked through the rubble to retrieve a crumpled stack of pages, carting his salvaged books away in a wheelbarrow. The pages were the typescript of Animal Farm, the short fable he had finished that February, and by the time he dug it out of the debris it had already been refused by his own publisher. Within weeks, the most celebrated poet-editor in England would refuse it too.
The rejection of Animal Farm is the most instructive turndown in modern publishing, because nothing about it involved bad writing. Every publisher who read the manuscript recognised its skill, and several said so in writing. They declined it anyway, for reasons of politics, timing and nerve, and one of them was T.S. Eliot. For any writer who suspects that rejection is a pure measure of quality, this story is the cleanest counterexample on record.
Finished in February, homeless by summer
Orwell wrote Animal Farm between November 1943 and February 1944, reading passages to his wife Eileen in the evenings and crediting her ear for some of its shape. It was short, barely thirty thousand words, and its target was unmistakable: a farmyard retelling of the Russian Revolution and Stalin's betrayal of it. He knew exactly how unwelcome that was. Britain was allied with the Soviet Union, the war was still being fought, and criticism of Stalin was treated in many offices as close to sabotage.
Orwell was forty, the author of nine books, none of which had made him financially secure. He was working as literary editor of Tribune and reviewing constantly to pay the bills. He believed Animal Farm was the best thing he had written. Getting anyone to print it would take him a year and a half.
Four refusals in a row
The rejections came from houses that all, in normal times, would have wanted him. Victor Gollancz, who held first refusal on his fiction, declined to attack a wartime ally. Jonathan Cape initially accepted the book, then reversed after consulting an official at the Ministry of Information; researchers later identified the likely official as Peter Smollett, who was subsequently shown to have been a Soviet agent. Faber & Faber said no through T.S. Eliot. In New York, Dial Press turned it down too, reportedly explaining that animal stories did not sell in America.
Orwell's response tells you what he was made of. He seriously prepared to publish the book himself as a two-shilling pamphlet, with a loan arranged through his friend David Astor, and he drafted a furious preface about self-censorship in the British press, The Freedom of the Press, which went unpublished in his lifetime and only surfaced in 1972.
The letter from T.S. Eliot
Eliot's letter, dated 13 July 1944, is famous because it is not stupid. Writing as a director of Faber, he acknowledged the fable's skill and placed its craft in the tradition of Swift. His objection was that the firm had no conviction the book's point of view was the right one from which to criticise the political situation of the moment. He also observed that since the pigs were the most intelligent animals on the farm, they were best qualified to run it, and that the real need was perhaps for 'more public-spirited pigs'.
It is worth sitting with how strange and how ordinary that is. One of the great poets of the century read one of the great satires of the century, saw its quality plainly, and declined it because of institutional weather. Editors do not read in a vacuum. They read inside firms, alliances, markets and moments, and in July 1944 the moment said no.
Secker & Warburg, and the honest role of luck
Fredric Warburg of Secker & Warburg, a smaller house already known for publishing awkward left-wing dissent, took the book. Wartime paper rationing delayed everything, so Animal Farm finally appeared on 17 August 1945, two days after the war in the Pacific ended, in a first printing of around 4,500 copies. It sold out quickly. The following year Harcourt, Brace published it in America, where it became a Book of the Month Club selection and sold in the hundreds of thousands.
Honesty requires naming the luck. Had the book appeared in 1944 as Orwell wanted, it would have landed on an audience still committed to the Soviet alliance. By late 1945 the weather had turned, and the same pages read as prophetic rather than treacherous. Orwell controlled none of that. What he controlled was keeping the manuscript alive and moving until the weather changed, which is the only part of the story a writer can copy.
What a working writer can take from it
First: rejection frequently measures the moment, not the manuscript. A no can be sincere, intelligent, well argued and wrong, and Eliot's letter proves all four can happen at once. When your work is declined, it is worth asking what the rejection is actually about, because sometimes the answer is a paper shortage, a list already full, or a political mood you cannot see from outside.
Second: notice what Orwell did not do. He did not revise the politics out of the book to please the houses that refused it. He distinguished between feedback about craft, which he took seriously all his life, and feedback that asked the book to be a different book, which he declined politely and kept moving. He also kept a floor under his dignity: if no publisher would have it, he would publish it himself. Writers with a floor negotiate from strength.
The work itself
Animal Farm rewards a writer's attention as a masterclass in compression. Thirty thousand words, no wasted scene, and a fable structure that lets enormous events stay readable and concrete. Pair it with Orwell's essay Why I Write, and with the rediscovered preface The Freedom of the Press, and you get the full lesson: clarity is not a style among others, it is a discipline, and it is what allowed a farmyard story to outlive the empire of the man it satirised.
What poets can take from this
- When rejected, ask whether the objection is about craft or about the publisher's own situation; only one of those is yours to fix.
- Keep a refused manuscript in motion; Animal Farm survived because it never stopped travelling.
- Do not revise the spine of a book to please the house that rejected it; find the house whose nerve matches the work.
- Decide your self-publishing floor in advance, the way Orwell priced his pamphlet, so no gatekeeper holds the only key.
- Reread old rejection letters a year later; like Eliot's, they often say more about their moment than about your pages.
Try it yourself
Write a poem or short verse fable set among animals who have just taken over one human space: a kitchen, a bus, a classroom. Let a single small rule change reveal who now holds power, and keep the politics entirely beneath the surface.
Questions
Who rejected Animal Farm?
Four publishers turned it down in 1944: Victor Gollancz, Jonathan Cape (which accepted and then withdrew after Ministry of Information advice), Faber & Faber through T.S. Eliot, and Dial Press in New York. Secker & Warburg finally accepted it, publishing in August 1945.
Why did T.S. Eliot reject Animal Farm?
Not for its quality. His letter of 13 July 1944 praised the fable's skill and compared its craft to Swift, but said Faber lacked conviction that its political viewpoint was the right one for the moment, when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union. His remark about needing 'more public-spirited pigs' became one of publishing's most quoted lines.
When was Animal Farm finally published?
Secker & Warburg published it on 17 August 1945 in a first printing of about 4,500 copies, limited by wartime paper rationing. The American edition followed in 1946 as a Book of the Month Club selection, and the book gave Orwell the first real financial security of his life, at forty-two.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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