Perhaps the twentieth century’s finest example is George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) political fable, which predicts the author’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Orwell makes use of a biting wit comparable to that of the eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift. Assigning farm animals the roles of Stalin, Trotsky, and the common man, Orwell writes a pessimistic allegory about the tyranny of world leaders and the foibles of the Bolshevik and every other revolution. The anti-utopian Animal Farm is prized for its simple, direct style and profound moral stance. In his review of the novel in the New York Times Book Review, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, “The story should be read in particular by liberals who cannot understand how Soviet performance has fallen so far behind Communist professions. ‘Animal Farm’ is a wise, compassionate and illuminated fable for our times.”