Bradbury was actually descended from one of the Salem ‘witches’, Mary Perkins Bradbury, who was sentenced to be hanged in 1692 but managed to escape before her execution could take place.īut enough pedantry. It is singularly apt, though, that it was the McCarthy witch hunts which inspired the book, given that the other great work of literature to respond to McCarthyism is probably Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which uses the Salem witch trials of the 1690s as an allegory for the anti-Communist ‘witch hunts’ of the 1950s. As Heinrich Heine had noted over a century before, ‘Wherever books are burned, men also, in the end, are burned.’ Holocaust, of course, means ‘whole burning’. The book was published eight years after the end of the Second World War, and it is worth remembering that book-burnings were an important part of the early years of national socialism in Germany. The book was published in 1953 at the height of the McCarthy ‘witch hunts’ in the US, and this culture of suppression and censorship, as Bradbury himself attested, is what helped to inspire the book, even though its meaning encompasses more general concerns about book-burning and the tyranny and suppression which that act signifies.
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