SOURCE: Cook, Timothy. “Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Orwell's Animal Farm: A Relationship Explored.” Modern Fiction Studies 30, no. 4 (winter 1984): 696-703.

In the following essay, Cook investigates the influence of Sinclair's The Jungle on Animal Farm.

Although George Orwell tells us that the idea of Animal Farm came from his actual experience of seeing a small boy easily controlling a huge carthorse with a whip,¹ various scholars have suggested literary sources or precedents for his fable. These include a number of Kipling's short stories,² the fourth book of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and, least plausibly, a section of John Gower's tedious Latin complaint Vox Clamantis, cited by Sean O'Casey, who makes his dislike of Animal Farm and his scorn for those who think it original very clear.³

Orwell was of course far too well read to have claimed “originality,” in the narrow sense of his having been the first person...