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    F451handout01 The Fifties

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    The 1950s were a decade of peace and prosperity, but they were anything but. Censorship was alive and well in the media; Comic books were condemned as subversive. The u.s. Was a nation of affluent, complacent souls, whose lives were filled with cookie-cutter houses.

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    F451handout01 The Fifties

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    The 1950s were a decade of peace and prosperity, but they were anything but. Censorship was alive and well in the media; Comic books were condemned as subversive. The u.s. Was a nation of affluent, complacent souls, whose lives were filled with cookie-cutter houses.

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    The 1950s were a decade of peace and prosperity, but they were anything but. Censorship was alive and well in the media; Comic books were condemned as subversive. The u.s. Was a nation of affluent, complacent souls, whose lives were filled with cookie-cutter houses.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    64 views1 page

    F451handout01 The Fifties

    Uploaded by

    api-189135717
    The 1950s were a decade of peace and prosperity, but they were anything but. Censorship was alive and well in the media; Comic books were condemned as subversive. The u.s. Was a nation of affluent, complacent souls, whose lives were filled with cookie-cutter houses.

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    HANDOUT ONE

    The Fifties
    As much as Fahrenheit 451 is about a time in the not-too-distant future, Ray Bradburys novel is anchored in the 1950s. Mildred Montag sits like a zombie in front of a telescreen. The sound of jet fighters crosses the sky in preparation for war. A neighborhood sits full of cookie-cutter houses and the complacent souls who live in them. All of these would have been familiar scenes to a writer at work in 1953. The era following World War II in the United States was known for its productivity, its affluence, and its social conformity. The economy was strong. The technology of television, air travel, and the transistor brought the future to the front stoop. The neighborhood Montag lives in probably looks a lot like Levittown, the famous low-cost housing development of the age that ushered in the rise of suburbia. But always, in the background, were rumors of war. Although the 1950s are remembered as a decade of peace and prosperity, they were anything but. The Korean War, which ended in the year that Fahrenheit 451 was published, saw tens of thousands of American deaths. The larger Cold War that lingered was a source of constant anxiety. In the new atomic age, everyone was learning that the world could be destroyed with the push of a button, a fate Bradbury more than hints at in his novel. Not only were governments endowed with nuclear weapons, they exercised the power to persecute suspected enemies closer to home. The Congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities began investigating suspected espionage in 1946, and within a few years Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was charging, without evidence, that dozens of government officials were Communist party members. Meanwhile, memories of Nazi book burnings and soviet censorship was still fresh in people's minds. As a result, censorship was alive and well in the media. Communists were assailed in the press. Comic books were condemned as subversive by parents and educators. Images of the organization man and the lonely crowd reflected changes in the American spirit. For all their prosperity and rising expectations, the 1950s were a decade of atomic tests and regional wars; racial segregation; government censorship and persecution; subtly enforced social orthodoxy; and building angst. The social and psychological problems of the era moved to the forefront in Fahrenheit 451, a book in which a society that seems oddly un-American in its intolerance of books also seems to reflect a double-edged prosperity that had overtaken the West.

    16 THE BIG READ

    National Endowment for the Arts

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