How 1950s dystopian novels inspired Margaret Atwood to write ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Author Margaret Atwood has said she prefers to call her work “speculative fiction” instead of science fiction. Gilead, the theocratic society in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” isn’t just a work of total imagination -- there’s precedence for that world.
In an interview with the PBS NewsHour, the author shared some of the other influential dystopian fiction that helped lay the groundwork for “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

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