Ray Bradbury vs. the Scholars

Posted on June 5, 2007

Ray Bradbury, who writes every day despite being a stroke survivor, is speaking out about Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury now says that his classic novel Fahrenheit 451 isnt' about censorship; it's about the dangers of television. Never mind the fact that scholars have been teaching for years that the novel is about government censorship and the dangers of the McCarthy era. Even Bradbury's official biographer said that the book was about censorship. But hey, it's his novel, he's entitled to say what it's about. Too bad about all those college courses, though.

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury's authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship. Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

Bradbury has done series of videos on his website in which he explains his thoughts on various issues. You can see them here.

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