In 1943, George Orwell was cold and broke.

He’d just quit the BBC to write a novel, moving to a basement flat in north-west London. After spending two years producing wartime propaganda, Orwell wrote that he felt like “an orange that’s been trodden on by a very dirty boot.”

The winter of 1943-44 was one of the coldest of the century. The flat had no heat. Every evening when his wife Eileen came home from her job at the Ministry of Food, Orwell read what he’d written that day. They huddled under heavy blankets in bed-the only warm place-laughing together as the story developed. Eileen’s colleagues remembered her arriving at work each morning with updates about the animals’ latest adventures. In three months, Orwell finished Animal Farm.

Then everything fell apart. His own publisher, a communist sympathizer, rejected it. T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber rejected it. Jonathan Cape agreed to publish it, then reversed his decision in June after consulting Peter Smollett at the Ministry of Information- later revealed to be a Soviet spy.

Also in June, the Orwells adopted a three-week-old baby boy, Richard. Days later, a German V-1 flying bomb obliterated their building. Orwell returned with a wheelbarrow and spent hours digging through rubble. Miraculously, he found the manuscript intact.

Finally in 1945, Secker & Warburg agreed to take the risk. Paper shortages delayed publication for months. Tragically, Eileen never saw it. For in March of 1945—nine months after they adopted Richard—she died during a routine hysterectomy. When Animal Farm appeared that August, it sold out immediately. The first American edition in 1946 became a bestseller. The book rejected by four publishers has since sold more than 11 million copies and never gone out of print. The royalties gave Orwell a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life.

Eileen would have been proud.