Conclusions Today authors around the world are finding publishers afraid to touch their manuscripts. Brave publishers are finding printers shutting down their presses to controversial volumes. Around the world, news of immolations like Elstner's are blacked out. Forty-eight hours, they said, and everyone home. No one seems to mind that they have yet to return.
Actual thought is indeed rare today, perhaps because it is so frowned upon.
Such hiding places are something that each of us should consider if the Fahrenheit 451 trends prevalent today are not reversed. I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Our future depends on truth and intellectual freedom rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the present. This article was published in slightly different form in The Last Ditch, no. 19, December 19, 1997.