n an unpublished afterword, Bradbury explains "Eating People Is Wrong was a novel I had worked on right through the Fifties – indeed from the moment, in 1950, when I went to a redbrick university, a first generation student, and looked in wonderment at what I saw... If the central character, the 40-year old Stuart Treece, is based on anyone, it is simply a projection of my 20-year old self – though the last thing I intended, when I wrote the book, was to become a professor of literature like him, which either says a lot for the power of fantasy, or the ironic workings of fate."