while policemen beat on the door of his studio. CBS executive Taylor Davidson demanded he break into the program to calm the hordes of terrified listeners. Welles’s reputed response was, “They’re scared? Good! They’re supposed to be scared!” But Welles and Houseman were also reported to be “bewildered, frightened, and genuinely remorseful,” and Welles’s public apology was enough to placate the enraged masses: “It was our thought that perhaps people might be bored or annoyed at hearing a tale so improbable.” Three years later, at age twenty-six, Welles would write, produce, and direct Citizen Kane (1941), called by many critics the greatest film of the twentieth century.

The broadcast of The War of the Worlds sparked an intense censorship debate. A general feeling that “something should be done” caused the Federal Communications Commission to open an investigation. Eventually, a sentiment emerged that the legal system’s provisions on behalf of the public interest should be used to impose restrictions on future radio programs. This idea was widely opposed by most on the Commission; one member, T. A. M. Craven, stated that it would make no attempt at “censoring what shall or shall not be said over the radio.”

Since 1938 several attempts have been made to recapture the excitement of the original broadcast. In 1975 The Night That Panicked America, a TV movie dramatizing the story of Welles’s broadcast, was nominated for several Emmys. In 1988 National Public Radio staged a fiftieth anniversary production of The War of the Worlds, which tried to blur the line between fiction and their familiar method of reporting news. Most startling was a February 12, 1949, radio broadcast in Quito, Ecuador, that tried to mimic Welles’s prank but ended by causing disaster. Many listeners ran to the mountains to hide from the invaders, while thousands panicked in the streets. When word came that the broadcast was a hoax, rioters stormed the radio station and burned it to the ground, killing twenty people.

Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

THE TIMES OF LONDON

The sorrows caused to England, and especially to a suburban district, by an invasion of mailed beings from Mars (very unlike Mr. du Maurier’s “Martian”) are the theme of The War of the Worlds. Mr. Wells combines the “Battle of Dorking,” in realism, with scientific fantasy. The fantasy is ingenious, nay, exceedingly ingenious, but there is a want of human interest in these gigantic, mail-clad, sexless, telepathic invaders. Suppose yourself at home with them, in Mars, and you will not find them good company. We might live a more interesting life with Victor Hugo’s pieuvre, comparatively a domestic animal. It is unnecessary, and, indeed, within the limits of space, impossible to give an idea of Martians as understood by Mr. Wells, but a very large, round, ruthless cuttlefish, with a genius for scientific inventions and applied mechanics, comes, perhaps, as near a Martian as a brief phrase will allow. Their ravages permit free contrast of the commonplace with the gruesome, and of these contrasts the book is made.

—April 18, 1898

THE NATION

As is well known, the scientifically gruesome is Mr. Wells’s forte. In his “Thirty Strange Stories” we supped on thirty kinds of horror, each course a brief one. But in the ‘War of the Worlds,’ which is a novel, we are sated with one long banquet of horrors. The usual miseries of war are not enough; a hundred new ones are invented to suit the invented inhabitants of another and a more highly civilized world. The men of “vast, cool, and unsympathetic intellects,” who are all brain and hand, smiting the heat-rays, and choking out life with tubes of liquid black smoke, make mere powder and shell household pets by comparison. To read this story of the emptying of London and the wasting of the Surrey by the loathsome Martians—for they are repulsive as well as fearful—is to quake by day and sink into nightmare after. Such tribute as this is certainly not to be denied it. The whole conception