THANKS, BOMC:

Animal Farm's positive reception in Great Britain was far exceeded by its smashing success in the United States. The initial American reaction to Orwell's fable came in the form of a favorable review in the very influential pages of Time in May 1946. Shortly thereafter, the Book-of-the-Month Club announced that Animal Farm would be its choice for the month of September, thereby guaranteeing Orwell a large audience in the United States for the first time.

The Club's selection of Animal Farm was probably the single most significant event for expanding Orwell's reputation in his lifetime, and arguably the most important event in his entire American reputation history. "The Uncle Tom's Cabin of our time," announced one member of the Club's selection committee. Extolling the fable's "worldwide importance," Club president Harry Scherman issued a special statement: "Every now and then through history, some fearless individual has spoken for the people of a troubled time.... Just so does this little gem of an allegory express, perfectly, the...inarticulate philosophy of tens of millions of free men.... Wherever men are free to read what they want, this book and its influence will spread."

As if to guarantee that outcome, Scherman also asked subscribers to pick Animal Farm rather than any alternate Club choice. The fable sold 460,000 copies during 1946-49 through the Club and soon became a runaway bestseller. By 1947, it had been adapted as a BBC radio play and translated into nine languages (and titled Comrade Napoleon in at least one language). In 1941, Arthur Koestler had bet some literary friends five bottles of burgundy that Orwell would be "the greatest bestseller" among them in five years' time: Animal Farm was proving Koestler prescient.

After the special treatment that Animal Farm received from the Book-of-the-Month Club came a rapturous welcome in America. The popular magazines--including Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times Magazine--were all enthusiastic in their admiration. One of the most flattering reviews came from the highly respected Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker. Wilson gave Orwell's reputation a generous boost by comparing him as a satirist with La Fontaine, Voltaire, and Swift. Naturally, some reviewers missed the point of the allegory. Edward Weeks, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, concluded an otherwise favorable comment by noting that Animal Farm showed a "clever hostility if one applies the analogy to Soviet Russia." If? To what other country could the analogy possibly have applied?

The political magazines on the left reacted with confusion and anger. They were still committed to the ideal of Soviet-American friendship and thus viewed Animal Farm as a lethal threat to that cause. The winds of the Cold War had not yet begun to blow strongly through the American literary scene. Isaac Rosenfeld in The Nation raised contrived, ideologically motivated reasons for disliking Orwell's tale, which were more obviously concerned with political than literary factors. He denied, for example, that Orwell's interpretation had any validity when applied to Russia. Rosenfeld conceded that at one time such a view had some relation to reality. But he argued that offering such an interpretation now made Animal Farm a reactionary work. There was little that Rosenfeld liked about Animal Farm. He believed that it not only failed to explain why the revolution was betrayed but, what was worse in his eyes, told readers things about Russia we already knew. This was a strange view from a journal that had sought to justify every switch of the communist line during the 1930s.

If Rosenfeld found Animal Farm insignificant, George Soule in the New Republic revealed a naiveté and hostility toward it that, particularly in hindsight, is embarrassing. According to Soule, Animal Farm was "dull" and the allegory was "a creaky machine for saying in a clumsy way things that have been better said directly." He neglected to say where these things were said better. Certainly not in the pages of the New Republic, which had been one of the most consistent apologists for Soviet Russia in the United States. Soule managed the difficult task of confusing the identities of both Snowball and Napoleon. He thought Napoleon was supposed to represent Lenin, failing to recognize Stalin's character in the successful pig who betrayed the Bolshevik Revolution.

Soule took strong exception to Orwell's description of the young dogs being trained as secret police, asking if one was supposed to take that seriously as a commentary on Soviet education. He also could not see any relationship between the slaughter of the old workhorse, Boxer, and any event in Soviet Russian history. That claim represents further testimony regarding his understanding, or rather lack of understanding, of Stalin's USSR in the 1930s, especially the purge of the faithful so-called Old Bolsheviks who had made the revolution a success. Yet such unfavorable reviews in the progressive journals could not offset the impact of the endorsement of the popular magazines.

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