Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Ray Bradbury Disavows Accepted Wisdom

Everybody knows about Fahrenheit 451, right? You know, Ray Bradbury's 1953 classic (also made into a movie) about book-burning, where the "Fire Department" comes out when called to set contraband books on fire?

A couple or three generations now have been indoctrinated about the book as a morality tale warning against government censorship. Well Ol' Ray is here to tell us we were wrong. He once walked out of a seminar at UCLA when the students in the class insisted on telling him what his book was about.

It turns out that Bradbury was writing about the vacuity of television and how it would destroy literature. Don't believe me? Watch Ray say it on video here. He says the culprit isn't the government...it's the people.

By the way, Ray recently declined to attend the presentation of his Pulitzer Prize for Literature, but if you want to read a little, we have Farewell, Summer, his unexpected sequel to Dandelion Wine.

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