In 2020, a group of time-honored American novels including Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” were banned from Burbank, California, schools over parents’ complaints of racism and racial slurs in the books. Back in 1951, Ray Bradbury predicted this type of censorship would happen and even offered hints about how to navigate it.
The prediction came in his futuristic dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) in which all books are banned, and the job of firemen, such as the protagonist Guy Montag, is not to put out fires but to set them: specifically, to burn books whenever a stash of them is discovered. Bradbury said he was inspired to write the book when he heard about the book burnings that took place in Nazi Germany and elsewhere; he imagined how such a thing could come to pass in America.
