I am just against bad television!”įahrenheit 451 is, without question, a book about the overreliance on technology in an increasingly pixelated society. When I asked Bradbury about the apparent hypocrisy of writing for television while lambasting it at the same time in the pages of his best-known work, he brushed off my question with a wave of his hand and a hearty chuckle, stating, “I never said I was against all television. In 1950, Bradbury wrote his first television script, beginning a long and successful run of writing for the new and burgeoning medium (including eight scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and three for The Twilight Zone). Yet his canon is peppered with revised versions of stories, altered tales rewritten at various stages of his career to better suit connected story cycles. “A writer must not tamper with his younger self,” he told me often. He never owned a computer, and he deemed the Internet a towering confluence of mostly inane chatter.Īnother example of his contradictory nature: Bradbury insisted to me that an older writer should never go back and rewrite his earlier published work. He didn’t fly on an airplane until he was 62.
Yet Bradbury never once drove an automobile himself.
Because of this, he has been hailed as a sort of technological soothsayer. Did Bradbury really mean it when he said his book was not about censorship? Could this great book, so long placed in the pantheon of anti-censorship literature, not be about censorship at all?Īs I stated in my first biography, Bradbury was a “mass of contradictions.” Here was a man who, with uncanny prescience, predicted flat-screen televisions, 24-hour banking machines, teen violence, the demise of literary reading, and the rising significance of technology in our day-to-day lives. I went to the White House with him in 2004 when he was given the Medal of Arts.īecause of this singular, decidedly complex relationship between biographer and subject, people often inquire about my opinions of Fahrenheit 451 and its themes.
Bradbury dedicated the 2003 collection Bradbury Stories: 100 of Bradbury's Most Celebrated Tales, in part, to me.
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