Bowdlerizing Bradbury

At The University Bookman, a new critical assessment of the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury offers this aperçu:

Literacy belongs to the humanity of the individual, which is why it threatens regimes. Seed stresses the prescience of Bradbury’s imagined future. “Given the subject of Fahrenheit 451,” he writes, “it is a supreme irony that in 1967, unbeknown to Bradbury, the editors at Ballantine bowdlerized the novel for a high-school edition, removing references to nudity and drinking, and also expletives.”