Alvin Toffler, the most popular futurist in America, became a celebrity in the 1960s and 1970s for his predictions and suggestions for ways people could cope with the unprecedented rate of change initiated by new technologies. With the publication of his bestseller Future Shock in 1970, Toffler became a household name and won many admirers in government and business. The Third Wave (1980) made him internationally known, and with Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the Twenty-First Century (1991) and Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave (1994), Toffler became a prominent political advisor.

Since 1993, Toffler's wife, Heidi, has begun to share authorial credit with him, although he claims that she co-authored all of his previous books as well. Together they are known as the couple "who brought futurism to the masses," as Michael Krantz has written in Time magazine.

In Future Shock, Toffler argued that Americans were experiencing confusion and denial about the changes they were witnessing in society. He called this "future shock," a concept he derived from the anthropological concept of "culture shock," which means the inability of members of primitive cultures to adapt to a more advanced culture. Very similarly, Toffler argued, Americans were growing unable to cope with the new culture that was coming into being as technology changed the way people worked and lived.

Witnessing the social upheaval of the 1960s, Toffler believed that the mass hysteria of the protests and growing divorce and crime rates were signs that Americans were reaching a limit beyond which they could accept no more change. As remedies to future shock, Toffler argued that children should read more science fiction and that the study of the future should become a standard part of American education.