Alvin Toffler, author of ‘Future Shock,’ dies at 87
Mr. Toffler was a self-trained social science scholar and successful freelance magazine writer in the mid-1960s when he decided to spend five years studying the underlying causes of a cultural upheaval that he saw overtaking the United States and other developed countries.
The fruit of his research, 1970’s “Future Shock,” was published in more than 100 countries, selling millions of copies, and catapulted Mr. Toffler to international fame.
In the book, in which he synthesized disparate facts from every corner of the globe, he concluded that the convergence of science, capital and communications was producing such swift change that it was creating an entirely new kind of society.
“The roaring current of change,” he said, was producing visible and measurable effects in individuals that fractured marriages, overwhelmed families and caused “confusional breakdowns” manifested in rising crime, drug use and social alienation.
Critics were not sure what to make of Mr. Toffler’s literary style or scholarship.
The mechanical engineering scholar and systems theorist Richard W. Longman wrote in the New York Times that Mr. Toffler “sends flocks of facts and speculation whirling past like birds in a tornado.”
In Time magazine, reviewer R.Z. Sheppard wrote, “Toffler’s redundant delivery and overheated prose turned kernels of truth into puffed generalities.”
Mr. Toffler’s work nevertheless found an eager readership among the general public, on college campuses, in corporate suites and in national governments.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, met the Tofflers in the 1970s and became close to them.
Only the speeches of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping sold more copies.
Mr. Toffler enrolled in New York University in 1946 and, by his account, spent the next four years only mildly interested in his academic work.
Mr. Toffler learned to weld and repair machinery and came to understand in the most personal way the toll that physical labor can have on industrial workers.
In 1954, soon after the birth of the couple’s only child, Karen, he persuaded the editor of Industry and Welding, a national trade magazine published in Cleveland, to hire him as a reporter.
Two years later, he sent Fortune magazine a proposal to write an article about the economics of the growing mainstream interest in the arts.
Besides his wife, Mr. Toffler is survived by a sister, Caroline Sitter.
Mr. Toffler published 13 books and won numerous honors, including a career achievement award in 2005 from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
Shel Israel, an author and commentator who writes about social media for Forbes, took issue with Mr. Toffler in 2012 for painting “a picture of people who were isolated and depressed, cut off from human intimacy by a relentless fire hose of messages and data barraging us.”