IT must rate as the literary snub of the 20th century. T S Eliot, one of Britain's greatest poets, rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm for publication on the grounds of its unconvincing Trotskyite politics. Eliot, a former director of Faber and Faber, the publisher, wrote his rejection in a highly critical letter in 1944, one of many private papers made available for the first time by his widow Valerie for a BBC documentary. When Orwell submitted his novel, an allegory on Stalin's dictatorship, Eliot praised its "good writing" and "fundamental integrity".
T S Eliot thought Animal Farm had "good writing" and "fundamental integrity", but also unconvincing. 