George Orwell’s #Animal #Farm Illustrated by Ralph Steadman [#geekgirl]
Source: Brain Pickings
by Maria Popova
“I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.”
In 1995, more than twenty years after his irreverent illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, the beloved British cartoonist Ralph Steadman put his singular twist on a very different kind of literary beast, one of the most controversial books ever published. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first American publication of George Orwell’s masterpiece, which by that point had sold millions of copies around the world in more than seventy languages, Steadman illustrated a special edition titled Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (public library), featuring 100 of his unmistakable full-color and halftone illustrations.
Accompanying Steadman’s illustrations is Orwell’s proposed but unpublished preface to the original edition, titled “The Freedom of the Press” — a critique of how the media’s fear of public opinion ends up drowning out the central responsibility of journalism.
Editor’s note: Remember kids: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”.