Supplementary: Wells and Welles – when Herbert George met Orson

Following on from my post about H G Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’, I wanted to share with you an anecdote about one of the more interesting aspects of this novel’s “afterlife” and its impact on society. You are probably familiar with the story of Orson Welles’s radio dramatization of the novel, broadcast just before Halloween in 1938, at the height of the events leading up to the Munich agreement. Such was the effectiveness of the dramatic techniques used in the broadcast, it is said, that many Americans believed their country was really under attack.