Seventy-five years ago today, “a little squib” contributed decisively to changing American attitudes toward the Soviet Union—our ally during the Second World War—and so to launching the Cold War. That sharp-edged squib was Animal Farm, a 30,000-word satire in the tradition of Aesop’s beast fables. The author who modestly described his own work as such was British writer Eric Blair (1903-50), better known by his pen name, George Orwell, and most famous for his next and last novel, 1984.
On August 26, 1946—exactly 12 months after American planes dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war in the Pacific—Orwell’s fable detonated on American shores, a literary nuclear weapon. Its impact on the cultural front of the Cold War proved immediate and lasting: never...