The Great Depression

Bradbury was born in 1920, and so was just nine years old when the Great Depression began, throwing his father out of work and forcing the family's move from Waukegan, Illinois. This event had a lasting effect on the writer. In his choice of his novel's setting, Green Town during the summer of 1928, Bradbury attempted to recreate a time and place that no longer existed, a place where the economic, political, and technological upheavals of the twentieth century had not yet touched. For Bradbury, the pre-Depression Midwestern town represented a kind of Eden, a place isolated from the rest of the world where people sat out on their porches at night and were truly neighborly. The social chaos brought on by the downward economic spiral of the Depression followed closely by the horrors of World War II made the final years before the Depression look particularly...