Foreign involvement in the Spanish Civil War Contingent. While not supported officially, many American volunteers such as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought for the Republicans. 'Spain' became the cause célèbre for the left-leaning intelligentsia across the Western world, and many prominent artists and writers entered the Republic's service. As well, it attracted a large number of foreign left-wing working class men, for whom the war offered not only idealistic adventure but also an escape from post-Depression unemployment. Among the more famous foreigners participating on the Republic's side was George Orwell, who went on to write about his experiences in "Homage to Catalonia". Orwell's novel "Animal Farm" was
Down and Out in Paris and London the time Orwell was there. In an essay for the 1971 "The World of George Orwell", Richard Mayne considered the book as typical of something that was true of a great deal of Orwell's later writing: his "relish at revealing behind-the-scenes squalor. He was always taking the lid off things—poverty, parlour Socialism, life in a coal mine, prep-school tyranny, the Empire, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the political misuse of language. He might well have echoed W.H. Auden: "All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie."" The narrator's comments on Jews in the book are cited