Animal Farm is the most famous by far of all twentieth-century political allegories, and its account of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master and then submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind can fairly be said to have become a universal drama for our time. Taking as his starting point the betrayed promise of the Russian Revolutioni, Orwell lays out a vision which, in its bitter wisdom, gives us the clearest understanding we possess of the possoble consequences of our social and political acts.