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During the war, Orwell and his wife lived in London. Cyril Connolly recalled: "He felt enormously at home in the Blitz, among the bombs, the bravery, the rubble, the shortages, the homeless, the signs of rising revolutionary temper." By then Orwell had become something of a celebrated eccentric, that gaunt Etonian who dressed like a working man (corduroy trousers, dark shirt, size-twelve boots), rolled his cigarettes from a pouch of acrid shag and poured his tea into a saucer before drinking it (there he goes, that Socialist who says such terrible things about Mr. Stalin). Eric Blair had totally metamorphosed into George Orwell; the mask had become the man. Money was still scarce; his books had made him well known but not solvent. He turned out columns for Tribune, a weekly organ of the non-Communist British left, and did wartime broadcasts for the BBC's Eastern Service to India and Southeast Asia. He also wrote Animal Farm.
This slight fable, scarcely longer than a short story, was Orwell's favorite among his works; it led directly back to his first, heady days in Barcelona. The abused, overworked animals rebel against the rule of the exploiting farmer, Mr. Jones; but the workers' paradise is soon commandeered and betrayed by a pig who bears more than a fleeting resemblance to Joseph Stalin. His credo: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Animal Farm was rejected by more than a dozen publishers in England and the U.S. The clear anti-Soviet parody bothered many of them. After all, the U.S.S.R. was an ally in the crusade against Hitler. But the publishers who finally accepted the book were amply rewarded; it has sold dependably for nearly 40 years.
Orwell's wife died in 1945, during surgery for uterine tumors. The widower was 41, tubercular, and left with an infant son, Richard, recently adopted. Loneliness, the responsibility of a child and the prospect of his own death drove him to propose marriage to a series of flabbergasted women. He wrote one, after two meetings, "You are young and healthy, and you deserve somebody better than me: on the other hand if you don't find such a person, and if you think of yourself as essentially a widow, then you might do worse—i.e., supposing I am not actually disgusting to you." Unsurprisingly, she declined the offer.
The success of Animal Farm at last brought Orwell some financial relief; he could afford to cut back on his journalism and devote more time to his next novel. He took a house on Jura, a windy, remote island off the western coast of Scotland. There, growing more ill each day, he completed Nineteen Eighty-Four.
He lived only seven months after its publication, long enough to realize that his book was becoming enormously successful and widely misunderstood. He attempted a note of clarification: "My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labor Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive." Few listened, trusting the title and the tale, not the teller.