Eliot rejected Orwell`s `Animal Farm`: letter

TS Eliot had refused George Orwell`s ‘Animal Farm’!

London, March 30: US-born poet TS Eliot refused to publish British novelist George Orwell`s ‘Animal Farm’ because of its ‘Trotskyite’ and unconvincing viewpoint, according to a newly-released letter.Eliot, working at British publishers Faber and Faber, sent a rejection letter to the young Orwell in 1944 dismissing the book, which went on to become a classic of modern English literature.

"Animal Farm" -- which is generally seen as an allegory on Stalinist communism in Russia -- was only published the following year, after the end of World War II. Orwell`s usual publisher Gollancz had refused to publish it, so the young writer tried his luck with Faber and Faber. But Eliot was not impressed, saying Orwell`s view "which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing." "We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time," he said. "After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore are the best qualified to run the farm. "In fact there couldn`t have been an Animal Farm without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs," he added. Bureau Report