Frowning at Conformity: Bradbury’s Growing Disillusionment in Freedom of Expression during the Cold War Dezhen Kong 11th Grade

After World War II, United States was growing in prosperity as a seeming winner of the war; yet, growing alongside of it, was an omnipresent fear and tension about technology and ideology---the summation of the oncoming Cold War. As a young writer in the midst of this mid-twentieth century panic between the Capitalistic U.S. and the Communist USSR regime, Ray Bradbury, like many others, communicated and protested the irrationality of the hidden war through a series of short stories and novels published at the time. Of those, The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, published consecutively in 1950 and 1953, respectively, still remain the best received for their adventurous take on the American mass culture hysteria and the irrational policy passed by Congress during the Cold War. An episodic novel, The Martian Chronicles focuses on the American superiority and conformity complex through a series of independent short stories that follow the American conquer of Mars. It often hints at the purification and destruction of ideas on Earth, aspects that are more fully explored in Fahrenheit 451. Well known for its extensive analogy of government censorship and mindless materialism, Fahrenheit 451 walks through the metamorphosis of a...