> After witnessing war, authors grew particularly concerned with totalitarian governments’ ability to regulate the arts. One of the most popular examples contin

> After witnessing war, authors grew particularly concerned with totalitarian governments’ ability to regulate the arts. One of the most popular examples continues to be Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which breathes into awfully vivid life the possibility of a future in which books are burned. This paragraph is a common misinterpretation. Ray Bradbury wasn't writing about the dangers of government control or censorship... Those things were consequential and not causal. He viewed the 'firemen' depicted in his novel as a side effect of shallow television pervading culture and destroying any interest in books. His book probably has more in common with Huxley than Orwell. Bradbury says as much himself about the theme of Fahrenheit 451 and its misinterpretation: > 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...His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point. [1] On another note, I've long considered the popularity of dystopian stories among teenagers to have an obvious cause: we put them in a suffocating, dystopian hellhole for 7+ hours per day and 5+ days per week. The majority of their lives are spent in an environment where authority is distant, absolute, and often lacking in empathy, and peers are often as dangerous as those authority figures. Paul Graham in particular discusses the dystopian nature of American schooling through the lens of nerds and popularity [2], and there are a few other articles I've read over the years which mention the notion that kids and teens relate to dystopian heroes precisely because of their own daily environment. [3] Also surprising that the article doesn't mention Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I would place on the level with The Giver in terms of establishing the recent youth focus of dystopian fiction. [1]: http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125 http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mis... [2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html [3]: https://the-artifice.com/popularity-of-dystopian-literature/ https://the-artifice.com/popularity-of-dystopian-literature/