"Harrison Bergeron" is Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 short story, first published in the October 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and later collected in Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). It is set in the year 2081, in an America where constitutional amendments have made every citizen equal in intelligence, beauty and physical ability — enforced by government-issued handicaps: mental-disruption earpieces for the intelligent, masks for the beautiful, and heavy weights for the strong.
George and Hazel Bergeron watch television, only dimly aware that their fourteen-year-old son Harrison — exceptionally strong, intelligent and handsome, and burdened with correspondingly heavy handicaps — has just broken out of jail. Harrison storms a live broadcast, declares himself Emperor, tears off his own restraints and those of a ballerina, and the two dance, briefly and gloriously unhandicapped, before the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers, shoots them dead on air.
A satirical, reductio-ad-absurdum critique of forced egalitarianism, the story is widely anthologized and taught, and won a Prometheus Award Hall of Fame citation.
