Britannica Explains In these videos, Britannica explains a variety of topics and answers frequently asked questions.Bradbury’s own publisher, Ballantine Books, even issued a censored version, which is surely the height of irony. The book also, in a sense, predicted its own fate: although there is no record of its having been officially burned anywhere, it has been banned on several occasions, notably in several schools in the US owing to its use of such words as ‘hell’, ‘damn’, and ‘abortion’. He only allowed his landmark novel to be published as an e-book in November 2011. Despite his talent for predicting the ways in which technology would progress, Bradbury was sceptical of many recent developments, such as the internet and electronic books (hardly surprising, given the subject of Fahrenheit 451). Even Facebook – given that people converse via a digital ‘wall’ in Bradbury’s novel – seems to have been eerily and prophetically prefigured in this novel.
His biographer, who bears the pleasingly Dickensian name of Sam Weller, has noted that, in Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury predicted a raft of later technological developments, among them flat-screen televisions, iPod earbuds, Bluetooth headsets, ATMs, and rolling news.
Bradbury was actually descended from one of the Salem ‘witches’, Mary Perkins Bradbury, who was sentenced to be hanged in 1692 but managed to escape before her execution could take place.īut enough pedantry. It is singularly apt, though, that it was the McCarthy witch hunts which inspired the book, given that the other great work of literature to respond to McCarthyism is probably Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which uses the Salem witch trials of the 1690s as an allegory for the anti-Communist ‘witch hunts’ of the 1950s. As Heinrich Heine had noted over a century before, ‘Wherever books are burned, men also, in the end, are burned.’ Holocaust, of course, means ‘whole burning’. The book was published eight years after the end of the Second World War, and it is worth remembering that book-burnings were an important part of the early years of national socialism in Germany.
The book was published in 1953 at the height of the McCarthy ‘witch hunts’ in the US, and this culture of suppression and censorship, as Bradbury himself attested, is what helped to inspire the book, even though its meaning encompasses more general concerns about book-burning and the tyranny and suppression which that act signifies.
0 kommentar(er)
