Ray Bradbury
In Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag is a fireman by trade, and comfortable in his job. He sets out each night with his crew, responding to emergency calls and incinerating any houses in the city found to harbor the most reprehensible material: books. He keeps the city safe from dangerous and corrupting ideas that could intrude on the shallow day-to-day entertainment of its citizens. But one night he encounters a neighbor, a strange girl who sets him thinking strange and introspective thoughts. Later, responding to a call, he keeps one of the books rather than letting it burn with the rest. As Montag starts to recognize the profound wrongness of the world around him, he is set on collision course with the forces he once championed.
Fahrenheit 451 is mostly remembered for all the book-burning, but at its core it is a quintessentially and thoroughly American dystopia as only a critic like Bradbury could write. It is also all the more relevant with time despite being written in the early 1950's. In this world, there's no dignity in being a pedestrian in a time of faster and faster cars, no patience for talking to neighbors when there's immersive and interactive room-sized TV available 24/7. This isn't the top-down oppression of 1984. It's a bottom-up, grassroots sort of totalitarianism, and all the more frighteningly plausible for it.
In Fahrenheit 451 the adults have their TVs on every chance then get, and the kids learn via TV in school. News, politics, education... everything is, one way or the other, entertainment. That same pattern in real life is diagnosed, and denounced, in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Over the centuries the shift from text to images to video for any and all communication has come at a cost of how we think and communicate with one another. Postman admires Brave New World for capturing the concept in fiction, but as I see it, Fahrenheit 451 comes even closer to the truth.
Mildred sat a moment and then, seeing that Montag was still in the doorway, clapped her hands. "Let's talk politics, to please Guy!"
"Sounds fine," said Mrs. Bowles. "I voted last election, same as everyone, and I laid it on the line for President Noble. I think he's one of the nicest-looking men ever became president."
"Oh, but the man they ran against him!"
"He wasn't much, was he? Kind of small and homely and he didn't shave too close or comb his hair very well."
"What possesssed the 'Outs' to run him? You just don't go running a little short man like that against a tall man. Besides-- he mumbled. Half the time I couldn't hear a word he said. And the words I did hear I didn't understand!"
"Fat too, and didn't dress to hide it. No wonder the landslide was for Winston Noble. Even their names helped. Compare Winston Noble to Hubert Hoag for ten seconds and you can almost figure the results."
"Damn it!" cried Montag. "What do you know about Hoag and Noble!"
"Why, they were right in that parlor wall [TV], not six months ago. One was always picking his nose; it drove me wild."
"Well, Mr. Montag," said Mrs. Phelps, "do you want us to vote for a man like that?"