Ray Bradbury wrote 'Fahrenheit 451,' his landmark dystopian novel, on a rented typewriter in the basement of a UCLA library.

Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' was originally called 'The Fireman,' but he changed the title after learning the temperature at which paper burns.

Science-fiction legend Ray Bradbury couldn't afford college, but he spent several days a week in his local library, teaching himself how to become a writer.

Read the writing advice of science-fiction legend Ray Bradbury.

Ray Bradbury used the structure of John Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' to structure his influential science fiction masterpiece, 'The Martian Chronicles.'

After his death in 2012, NASA paid tribute to Ray Bradbury by naming a rover landing site on Mars after him.

Ray Bradbury said he was inspired to pursue writing after meeting a magician named Mr. Electrico, but scholars have never been able to confirm the story.

An early short story by Ray Bradbury was plucked from an open submission call by 'In Cold Blood' author Truman Capote, who believed he'd found a significant voice.

Watch the 1956 film adaptation of 'Moby-Dick,' cowritten by sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury.

Sci-fi author Ray Bradbury offered to help aid the Kennedy Administration during the 1960s Space Race.

Watch an episode of 'Ray Bradbury Theater,' the sci-fi writer's '80s HBO show, starring a young Jeff Goldblum.

How literary agent Scott Meredith invented the modern book auction

Prior to the 1964 auction of "The Night Action" for $13,500 to New American Library, a gentleman's code persisted in the literary world: no manuscript should be shared with more than one publisher at a time. Meredith—the agent behind Norman Mailer, Carl Sagan, and Arthur C. Clarke—leveraged his deep knowledge of the talent pool to publishers, sending around manuscripts to 19 different publishers to generate a bidding war. The Beat-influenced novel eventually flopped and is now out of print.

Court documents show that Anthropic bought and destructively scanned millions of books to gather high-quality text to train the software underlying its AI products.

Dystopian satire became more prominent in the 20th century

Although "anti-utopian" stories have always existed, the international conflicts of World War I and World War II inspired some of dystopian literature’s most influential novels, like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s "We," Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World," and George Orwell’s "1984." In the decades to follow, more writers would follow the example of those early novels, using the dystopian model to critique artificial intelligence, climate change, and more.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the entire first draft of 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' in a frantic three days, only to burn it out of disgust.

Circulating libraries helped the novel's popularity surge

As literacy rates began to rise in the 19th century, so did the demand for reading materials. The only problem? Newspapers and books weren’t cheap, and newly literate middle-class families struggled to afford literature. That changed when booksellers began offering small fees for patrons who decided to borrow rather than purchase books. This was eventually called a circulating library, an innovation that would satisfy the burgeoning readership of novels and increase literacy rates further.

Improve your typing speed by retyping classic literature

Why practice with nonsense letters and syllables when you can retype full books you always wanted to read, from Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to George Orwell and W.E.B. duBois. And it's free.

The printing press spread novels widely

Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440 changed how writing was reproduced. It allowed multiple manuscripts to be copied via movable type rather than by hand, making more literature more widely available. Over time, that change caused literacy rates to rise, creating a market for even more literature.

Well before the publication of 'Walden,' Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with an unruly campfire.

Arnold Schoenberg designed a musical typewriter that transcribed complex compositions with a simple keyboard.

The opening chapters of bestselling novels are thousands of words shorter than they were in the 1950s

Novels like "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Lord of the Flies" averaged opening chapters with about 4,500 words. Titles from the 2020s, on the other hand, including "Fourth Wing" and "Lessons in Chemistry," are closer to 2,500 words.

Kurt Vonnegut's letter to the school board that banned his book

In 1973, a high school English teacher in North Dakota taught Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five," the classic time-hopping novel about World War II and the bombing of Dresden. The head of the school board was outraged by what he considered to be obscene material in Vonnegut's novel and ordered all of the students' copies of the book burned. When Vonnegut caught wind of those plans, he wrote this letter to the school board, protesting the decision.

Mass market paperbacks—the chunky, cheaply made books—were originally designed to fit in a pocket.

Why country singer Zach Bryan purchased the original 'On the Road' manuscript

The superstar paid $12.1M for the original draft of Kerouac's novel, which was written on a 120-foot typescript scroll so the text could be read without stopping. Bryan recently purchased a church in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, with plans to turn it into the Jack Kerouac Center. The scroll will likely be housed there.

Stephen King threw the draft of 'Carrie,' his first hit, into the trash, but his wife rescued it and convinced him to stick with it.

The Library of America, a reissue series that began in 1982, repackaged classic works of American writers at a low cost to encourage readers to engage with what it considered the American literary canon.

Stephen King once discontinued his own book, fearing it was inspiring school shootings.

Aldous Huxley, author of 'Brave New World,' wrote to his former student, George Orwell, after the release of '1984,' suggesting that Orwell's vision of dystopia was misguided.

'The Stranger' remains a popular novel for teenagers

Camus' book's themes—alienation, transgression, and existentialism—continue to resonate with adolescent reader. That's also true of other popular teenage touchstones, like Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," and Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar," which are still widely read—and assigned by high school teachers. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

As a child, Twain worked as a 'printer's devil'

Twain’s father died in 1847, forcing the 12-year-old Twain to leave school to earn money for the family. He took up work in a print shop as a “printer’s devil,” or an apprentice. He became fascinated with the technology, an experience he’d pursue further when he became a journalist several years later.

Amazon sold its first book on April 3, 1995

Before selling everything on the internet, Amazon started as an online bookstore. The company's first customer was a man named John Wainright, who purchased "Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought" by Douglas Hofstadter. There's a building named after Wainwright on Amazon's Seattle campus.

Benjamin Franklin founded America's first lending library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, in 1731.

Critic Neil Postman argued modern technology is dystopian

Cultural critic Neil Postman argued in 1985's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" that mass media had made the dystopia of Huxley's "Brave New World" a reality. In 1992, he published "Technopoly," a wider critique of the utopian visions of technology or, as Postman calls it, "all of the machinery that takes people out of public arenas and keeps them fixed in their homes."

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

How a sick George Orwell finished '1984'

The writer worked on the novel while living in a remote cottage in Scotland. While he was there, he was in a boating accident that sent him overboard, eventually leading to a fatal bout of tuberculosis. Orwell finished the novel (and massive revisions) while trying to recover. He died in 1950, at 46.

Inside 'Blood Meridian' author Cormac McCarthy's library of 20,000 books

The reclusive writer published 12 novels and taught himself stonemasonry and quantum physics, among myriad other skills and subjects. Since he died in 2023, scholars have been mining his personal library for lessons on his influences, interests, and more.

Stephen King isn't sure writing can be taught, encouraging aspiring novelists to read as much as possible instead.

Science fiction or new technology?

Dystopian literature is no longer relegated to the page, with innovations like the Tesla Cybertruck and Meta virtual reality headsets mirroring the aesthetics of texts like "The Running Man" and "Neuromancer." In this essay, Casey Michael Henry argues that the images from these works remain while their messages have faded.

DH Lawrence's novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' was banned for obscenity in numerous countries, but small private printings turned it into an underground sensation in the late 1920s.

Benjamin Franklin advocated for the use of paper money and even engineered some key anticounterfeiting techniques used today.

If a publisher wants to sell fan fiction, they encourage writers to change key details

Historically, companies that publish popular fan fiction have their authors change a few details—like character names, settings, or other details—to avoid potential copyright violations. Many believe the risk is worth the reward, though the legality remains murky. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Inside the lives of FIRE followers

A man named Barney Whiter saved half of his salary each month so that, eventually, he could retire at age 43. Other FIRE followers rent out rooms in their homes or even their cars in attempts to achieve the same financial freedom.

Check out cheap, mass-market, and often trashy editions of classic books from Ralph Ellison, James Joyce, Jane Austen, and many more.

Where to start with dystopian literature master Octavia Butler

Rather than simply forecasting events, which she managed with startling accuracy, Butler used dystopian science fiction to explore racial and environmental issues, leaving behind a body of work that was both innovative and thought-provoking. This guide will show you where to begin.

Fanfiction proliferated on fan-made sites in the 1990s

As the internet became more accessible in the '90s, fanfiction writers created websites dedicated to publishing stories about their favorite characters. Still, the hobby was far from mainstream. As one writer from that time said, "Going to Star Trek/comic book conventions in the '80s and '90s was something nerds did. Telling people you read or wrote fan fiction put you in the super geek category."

The Bauhaus designer who predicted the future of graphic design

László Moholy-Nagy believed that technology would eventually turn typesetting into a process that allowed fonts to be easily modified rather than manually constructed. This history from the American Institute of Graphic Arts digs into how Moholy-Nagy arrived at those prescient theories.

King was outed as Bachman by a bookstore clerk

King published several books in the 1970s and '80s under the pen name Richard Bachman, a device that allowed him to publish outside the horror genre. Eventually, Bachman was unmasked when a bookshop clerk noticed similarities between the Bachman novel "Thinner" and some of King's other titles. A 2024 study in the Journal of Computational Literary Studies used quantitative methods to find similarities between works published under Bachman and King, arguing that genuine literary voices are immutable, despite some authors' efforts.

The novel broke new ground by offering realistic stories

In this brief interview, Terry Castle, an English professor at Stanford, explains the origins of the early British novel. Castle details how the novel was produced for a newly literate middle class interested in recognizable characters and stories “about life as they knew it” rather than Greek and Roman myths or medieval romances. She also explains why a newly enfranchised female demographic was attracted to the fiction of writers like Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.

Why dystopian literature remains popular

Yale English professor Joe Cleary argues that dystopian literature’s continued relevance is due to a torrent of additional societal anxieties and that the streaming adaptations of dystopian classics "The Handmaid’s Tale" and "The Man in the High Castle" have expanded the genre’s popularity, introducing new audiences to its tropes.

Read George Orwell's essay 'Why I Write,' the writer's memoir on how he came to literature.

The Manhattan Project, the top-secret American program that built the world's first atomic bomb, cost $27B in today's dollars and reshaped global power.