Ray Bradbury Reveals the True Meaning of Fahrenheit 451: It’s Not About Censorship, But People “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

Even those of us who’ve nev­er read Ray Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 know it as a sear­ing indict­ment of gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship. Or at least we think we know it, and besides, what else could the sto­ry of a dystopi­an future where Amer­i­ca has out­lawed books whose main char­ac­ter burns the few remain­ing, secret­ed-away vol­umes to earn his liv­ing be about? It turns out that Brad­bury him­self had oth­er ideas about the mean­ing of his best-known nov­el, and in the last years of his life he tried pub­licly to cor­rect the pre­vail­ing inter­pre­ta­tion — and to his mind, the incor­rect one.

“Fahren­heit 451 is not, he says firm­ly, a sto­ry about gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship,” wrote the Los Ange­les Week­ly’s Amy E. Boyle John­son in 2007. “Nor was it a response to Sen­a­tor Joseph McCarthy, whose inves­ti­ga­tions had already instilled fear and sti­fled the cre­ativ­i­ty of thou­sands.” Rather, he meant his 1953 nov­el as “a sto­ry about how tele­vi­sion destroys inter­est in read­ing lit­er­a­ture.” It’s about, as he puts it above, peo­ple “being turned into morons by TV.” John­son quotes Brad­bury describ­ing tele­vi­sion as a medi­um that “gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” spread­ing “fac­toids” instead of knowl­edge. “They stuff you with so much use­less infor­ma­tion, you feel full.”

He did­n’t much like radio either: just two years before Fahren­heit 451, Brad­bury wrote to his sci-fi col­league Richard Math­e­son bemoan­ing its con­tri­bu­tion to “our grow­ing lack of atten­tion,” and its cre­ation of a “hop­scotch­ing exis­tence” that “makes it almost impos­si­ble for peo­ple, myself includ­ed, to sit down and get into a nov­el again.” For the aban­don­ment of read­ing he saw in soci­ety, and from which he extrap­o­lat­ed in his book, he blamed not the state but the peo­ple, an enter­tai­ment-as-opi­ate-addict­ed “demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety whose diverse pop­u­la­tion turns against books: Whites reject Uncle Tom’s Cab­in and blacks dis­ap­prove of Lit­tle Black Sam­bo,” lead­ing to wide­spread cen­sor­ship and even­tu­al­ly the burn­ing of all read­ing mate­r­i­al.

But books still do face chal­lenges (and the FBI even had its eye on Brad­bury and his genre), chal­lenges only an intel­li­gent, non-numbed pub­lic can beat back. “I get let­ters from teach­ers all the time say­ing my books have been banned tem­porar­i­ly,” says Brad­bury in the clip above. “I say, don’t wor­ry about it, put ’em back on the shelves. You keep putting them back and they keep tak­ing them off, and you final­ly win.” The authors, even Brad­bury, can’t help, but he would always tell these lit­er­ar­i­ly-mind­ed peo­ple who wrote to him in dis­tress the same thing: “You do the job. You’re the librar­i­an. You’re the teacher. Stand firm and you’ll win. And they always do.”

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Father Writes a Great Let­ter About Cen­sor­ship When Son Brings Home Per­mis­sion Slip to Read Ray Bradbury’s Cen­sored Book, Fahren­heit 451

Who Was Afraid of Ray Brad­bury & Sci­ence Fic­tion? The FBI, It Turns Out (1959)

Ray Brad­bury: “I Am Not Afraid of Robots. I Am Afraid of Peo­ple” (1974)

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

Hear Ray Bradbury’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Sto­ry Fahren­heit 451 as a Radio Dra­ma

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.