Ray Bradbury, American Individualist

In a dramatic moment in the early 1990s, now famous among conservatives and libertarians, the author Ray Bradbury threw down the gauntlet regarding political correctness. Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of his most famous book, the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury proclaimed, “All the politically correct terrorists must be driven back into the stands. There is no place for them in the open field of democratic ballplaying.” When the book was released in 1953, the disciples of political correctness wanted to cancel everyone from Kipling to Mark Twain, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Conan Doyle, and things had only deteriorated in the intervening decades: “Today, there is no fear of book-burners, only non-teachers and nonreaders, which means no need of books and so no burning.”