I argue that Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) engages mid-century debates over “culture” and literary value on two axes: anthropological debates over relativism, universalism and what constitutes “a culture;” and “humanist” debates over “high Culture” and “mass culture.” On the one hand, the Chronicles draw on pluralist construction of cultures as meaningful “wholes” versus fractured modernity, in ways that echo Boasian anthropologists such as Edward Sapir. On the other hand, the text simultaneously articulates an assimilationist “universalism” which in turn reflects post-WWII shifts within anthropology and US culture more broadly, toward articulating a normative, unified American “way of life” centered on individual “equality,” which was both distinctly “American” and could also be promoted as “universal.” This shift toward universalism in turn reflects popular images of and changing federal policy toward American Indians, in ways that—like Bradbury’s text itself—might be seen as simultaneously progressive and reactionary. Finally, The Martian Chronicles also engages debates around “high Culture” and mass culture, positioning science fiction as embodying an emerging Cold War liberal “center,” as an imaginative literature that celebrates individual freedom in the face of attempts to morally censor mass culture, and in the face of elitist “high modernism.”