FAHRENHEIT 451

by RAY BRADBURY

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New softcover book. 196 pages, 50th Anniversary Edition, includes a conversation with the author.

Fahrenheit 451, is a dystopian soft science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury. It was first published in 1953. It is a critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society, written in the early years of the Cold War.

Fahrenheit 451 takes place in an unspecified future time in a hedonistic and rabidly anti-intellectual America that has completely abandoned self-control, filled with lawlessness in the streets, from teenagers crashing cars into people to firemen at Montag's station who set their mechanical hound to hunt various animals for the simple and grotesque pleasure of watching them die. Anyone caught reading books is, at the minimum, confined to a mental hospital while the books are burned. Illegal books mainly include famous works of literature, such as Whitman and Faulkner, as well as The Bible, and all historical texts.

The novel presents a future American society in which the masses are hedonistic, and critical thought through reading is outlawed. The central character, Guy Montag, is employed as a "fireman" (which, in this future, means "book burner"). The number "451" refers to the temperature in Fahrenheit at which a book or paper autoignites.
Over the years, the novel has been subject to various interpretations, primarily focusing on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which leads to a perception of knowledge as being comprised of "factoids", partial information devoid of context, e.g. Napoleon's birth date alone, without who he was.
Bradbury has stated that the entirety of his novel was written in the basement of UCLA's Powell library on a pay typewriter. His original intention in writing Fahrenheit 451 was to show his great love for books and libraries. He has often referred to Montag as an allusion to himself.

Although the novel has been banned or challenged in some countries, it is, along with Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and 1984 by George Orwell, among the most famous literary representations of dystopia.

About the Author

Ray Douglas Bradbury (born August 22, 1920) is an American literary, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer best known for his 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 book which has been described both as a short story collection and a novel. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most popular American writers of speculative fiction during the twentieth century.

Bradbury graduated from the Los Angeles High School in 1938 but chose not to attend college. Instead, he sold newspapers at the corner of South Norton Avenue and Olympic Boulevard. He continued to educate himself at the local library, and having been influenced by science fiction heroes like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, he began to publish science fiction stories in fanzines in 1938. Ray was invited by Forrest J Ackerman to attend the now legendary Clifton’s Cafeteria Science Fiction Club. Here Ray met the writers Robert A. Heinlein, Emil Petaja, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett, and Jack Williamson. Launching his own fanzine in 1939, titled Futuria Fantasia, he wrote most of its four issues, each limited to under a hundred copies. Bradbury's first paid piece was for the pulp magazine Super Science Stories in 1941, for which he earned . He became a full-time writer by the end of 1942. His first book, Dark Carnival, a collection of short works, was published in 1947 by Arkham House, a firm owned by writer August Derleth. Although he is often described as a science fiction writer, Bradbury does not box himself into a particular narrative categorization.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury