The Crucible

Listening to the discussion in class today about the new book we are reading, "The Crucible" I thought that talking about the author and the way he wrote it would make a good blogpost. The author of the book, Arthur Miller starts the book in saying that he actually toned the book down by adding age to one of the characters, and making the amount of victims smaller. This was a very strange thing for me to hear. In American society we are used to everything being hyped up. You see a movie that says based on a true event, and the most they have in common are the names of the people(not all the time) and a basically similar storyline. People in our country have become desensitized on their own because of the material they have been shown. While talking about the rights people have in class today as well, we talked about what could be considered pornographic. Can gore and blood and scare be considered too much for people to comprehend?
The idea that really makes me think is that this author did not want the story to be any worse then it was originally. I have yet to start the book, so if he really wanted to make the book sound less severe then it already sounds, what frightening things could be hiding in the pages? We always get to tell ourselves during scary movies that its not real, or this is a complete exageration, but in this book we dont get that privilage.