The Best Satire Books, From Animal Farm to Catch-22
Satire covers a lot of ground. It can be a beast fable about a revolution gone wrong, a comic novel about three friends and a dog on the Thames, or a war story that makes military bureaucracy look as dangerous as the enemy. The books below all use comedy, exaggeration or absurdity to take aim at something real.
The list is ordered by how much interest our readers show in each title. Every pick has a solid claim to the label: prize winners, novels that appear on the major all-time lists, and comic classics that have stayed in print for well over a century. Each entry explains what the book is about and what it is attacking.
Animal Farm
Orwell's 1945 novella follows the animals of Manor Farm as they overthrow their drunken owner and set up a society where all animals are equal, only for the pigs to take control and rebuild the old tyranny under new slogans. Orwell described it in a letter as a satirical tale against Stalin, drawing on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Stalinist years that followed. His hostility to Moscow-directed Stalinism was shaped by what he saw during the Barcelona May Day conflicts in the Spanish Civil War. It appears on all-time novel lists, on banned book lists and on school reading lists, and is the most viewed title in this genre among our readers.
Three Men In A Boat
Jerome K. Jerome set out to write a serious travel guide to the Thames, and the jokes took over. Published in 1889, it follows J., George, Harris and the dog Montmorency on a two-week boating holiday from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back, with set pieces including the Irish stew and the plaster of Paris trout. The two human friends were based on real companions, Jerome's boating partners George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel. One of the most praised things about the book is how little it has dated: the comedy still reads as fresh more than a century on.
Thank You, Jeeves
Published in 1934, this is the first full-length Jeeves and Wooster novel, though Jeeves spends most of it working for somebody else. Bertie's relentless banjolele playing drives Jeeves out of his service, and Bertie retreats to a cottage in Somersetshire, where he is pulled into Lord Chuffnell's attempt to sell his crumbling hall and propose to Pauline Stoker. The plot runs through a yacht, a kidnapping, a knife-wielding drunken valet and a cottage fire. Wodehouse aims his comedy at the English class system and the idle rich who sit on top of it.
The Code of the Woosters
The third full-length Jeeves novel, from 1938, sends Bertie to Totleigh Towers to steal back a silver cow creamer for his Aunt Dahlia. It introduces Sir Watkyn Bassett, a magistrate who once sentenced Bertie, and Roderick Spode, leader of a Fascist organisation whom Bertie eventually faces down with the single word "Eulalie". The Spode material makes this the most pointedly political of the Jeeves books. It continues the story of Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeline Bassett from Right Ho, Jeeves.
Breakfast of Champions
Vonnegut's seventh novel, from 1973, builds towards the meeting of two men in Midland City, Ohio: Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy Pontiac dealer losing his mind, and Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer who believes nobody reads him. Hoover takes one of Trout's novels literally, decides everyone around him is an unfeeling robot, and goes on a rampage. The book deals with free will, suicide and race relations, and the author eventually walks into his own story as a character. It is illustrated throughout with Vonnegut's own playful drawings.
Catch-22
Heller's 1961 debut is often cited as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, and it sits on both the TIME 100 novels and Modern Library 100 lists. Captain Yossarian is a bombardier stationed on Pianosa who wants to stop flying missions, but his commanding officer keeps raising the number required so he can look brave to his own superiors. The narration jumps around in time and between characters, and the comedy gradually hardens into something much darker. Its target is military bureaucracy and greed, and it gave the English language a phrase for a trap with no exit.
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Mark Twain's 1889 novel knocks Hank Morgan, a Connecticut firearms engineer, unconscious and deposits him in sixth-century England. He talks his way out of execution using his knowledge of a solar eclipse, sets himself up as a rival to Merlin and starts trying to modernise Camelot with democratic reforms. Twain wrote it as a burlesque of Romantic notions of chivalry, and quotes directly from Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur throughout.
Crome Yellow
Aldous Huxley's first novel, published in 1921, takes place almost entirely at a country house party. Denis Stone, described by his hostess as one of our younger poets, is secretly in love with Anne Wimbush and spends the book failing to say so, while the other guests pursue their own obsessions, from alternative spirituality to visions of a dystopian future. The satire is aimed at the literary and intellectual poses of its day. It remains in print and has been adapted for other media.
Dead Souls
Gogol's 1842 novel is widely regarded as an exemplar of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Pavel Chichikov travels from estate to estate buying "dead souls", serfs who have died but still appear on the tax rolls, as part of a scheme to make himself rich on paper. The landowners he meets are caricatures of the Russian middle aristocracy, each greedy or paranoid or corrupt in his own peculiar way. Gogol planned three volumes and burned the second shortly before his death, so the book ends mid-sentence, though many readers consider it complete as it stands.
Babbitt
George F. Babbitt is a prosperous real estate broker in his late forties who condemns the corruption he practises himself and climbs socially while snubbing anyone beneath him. Lewis follows him as he slowly turns against the standards he has spent his life defending, with results that reviewers noted amount to very little plot and a great deal of observation. The controversy the book caused was influential in the decision to award Lewis the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. The word "Babbitt" entered the dictionary as a term for someone who conforms unthinkingly to middle-class standards.
Arrowsmith
Sinclair Lewis followed Babbitt with this 1925 novel, which was recognised in the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It turns his satirical eye on science and the medical profession, working through themes of ambition, morality and identity. It was adapted for the screen in 1931.
Satire ages in odd ways. Some of these books were written about specific governments, professions or social sets that no longer exist, and they still land. If you want a starting point, Animal Farm is the shortest and Catch-22 the most ambitious.