The author's brilliant short novel now regarded as a minor masterpiece of twentieth century literature. Although it took only three months to write, the gestation of a short fable to express Orwell's growing dissatisfaction with the USSR and Communism in general had been some six years in the making. Orwell flippantly dismissed the work prior to publication as "a little squib, which might amuse you when it comes out" (letter to Gleb Struve, Feb 1944), adding prophetically, "it is so not O.K. politically that I don't feel certain in advance that anyone will publish it." Within a month, Orwell's long term publisher and supporter, Victor Gollancz, had refused the manuscript out of hand, as had several other publishers. T.S.Eliot, though rejecting it on behalf of Faber, clearly admired the work, "a distinguished piece of writing. the narrative keeps one's interest on its own plane - and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver." Frederick Warburg, shrewdly assessing that publishing a work of genius and the possibility of gaining Orwell as an author outweighed the political risk, agreed to publish it on the spot. Further difficulty was encountered finding sufficient paper in war time, but when published the first edition of 4500 copies was out of print within "a matter of days" (Warburg) Writing later, Orwell concluded, "[Animal Farm] was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole." Malcolm Bradbury describes it not only as "the most important work of fictional political satire to be written in twentieth-century Britain", but appositely as, "the first British post-war novel, not least because. it decidedly influenced a new lineage of liberal and socially attentive writing in British fiction".