Also, and I think very exceptionally indeed for a TZ episode that first aired 63 years ago now, the author of the original short story, Lynn Venable is still with us. I note (I should have looked there first) that the wikipedia article does mention in passing, without exploring it, anti-intellectualism. If I think about it, most The Twilight Zone episodes seemed to have "regular folks" as main characters - and if they wuzn't, they were evil guys who read books or worse ineffectual guys who read poetry. I think if one researched it further, one would find that anti-communism and anti-intellectualism are related and maybe this is something about the 1950s and 1960s that The Twilight Zone is revealing. I think Ike was an intelligent and good man, but of course intellectual is different than intelligent. Famously, when Ike was compared with Stevenson, the former was described as someone one would invite to a BBQ but the latter not so much. I recall that the advent of the Eisenhower presidency had something to do with this anti-intellectualism - I did not IIRC make this idea up.
My question is, was this a comment by the writer about anti-intellectualism in the 1960s - the main character was actually a little off? Or were his wife and boss the atypical ones? I recall really being as horrified as the main character was - what kind of person would destroy a book? It was not even like she wanted his company or something - she just wanted to deprive him of a pleasure, but also seemed to feel that it was a very odd thing to indeed read for pleasure.
His boss, perhaps rightly somewhat, objects to his using company time but his wife is this horrifying character who destroyed a book of poetry (IIRC) and was amused when Meredith's character discovers this. In the well-known episode with Burgess Meredith we see both his boss and his wife take exception to his penchant for reading.
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