First edition cover (clothbound)
| |
| Author | Ray Bradbury |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Joseph Mugnaini |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Dystopian |
| Published | October 19, 1953 (Ballantine Books) |
| Pages | 158 |
| ISBN | 978-0-7432-4722-1 (current cover edition) |
| OCLC | 53101079 |
| 813.54 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3503.R167 F3 2003 |
Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury, first published in 1953. It is regarded as one of his best works. The novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found. The book's tagline explains the title: "Fahrenheit 451 – the temperature at which book paper catches fire, and burns..." The lead character, Guy Montag, is a fireman who becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge, eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of literary and cultural writings.
The novel has been the subject of interpretations focusing on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury said that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns at the time (during the McCarthy era) about the threat of book burning in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature.
In 1954, Fahrenheit 451 won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal. It later won the Prometheus "Hall of Fame" Award in 1984 and a "Retro" Hugo Award, one of only six Best Novel Retro Hugos ever given, in 2004. Bradbury was honored with a Spoken Word Grammy nomination for his 1976 audiobook version.
Adaptations of the novel include François Truffaut's 1966 film adaptation and a 1982 BBC Radio dramatization. Bradbury published a stage play version in 1979 and helped develop a 1984 interactive fiction computer game titled Fahrenheit 451, as well as a collection of his short stories titled A Pleasure to Burn. HBO released a television film based on the novel and written and directed by Ramin Bahrani in 2018.
Plot summary
Fahrenheit 451 is set in an unspecified city (likely in the American Midwest) in the year 1999 (according to Ray Bradbury’s Coda), though it is written as if set in a distant future. The earliest editions make clear that it takes place no earlier than the year 1960.
The novel is divided into three parts: "The Hearth and the Salamander", "The Sieve and the Sand", and "Burning Bright".
"The Hearth and the Salamander"
Guy Montag
is a "fireman" employed to burn the possessions of those who read
outlawed books. He is married but has no children. One fall night while
returning from work, he meets his new neighbor, a teenage girl named
Clarisse McClellan, whose free-thinking ideals and liberating spirit
cause him to question his life and his own perceived happiness. Montag
returns home to find that his wife Mildred has overdosed on sleeping
pills, and he calls for medical attention. Two uncaring EMTs
pump Mildred's stomach, drain her poisoned blood, and fill her with new
blood. After the EMTs leave to rescue another overdose victim, Montag
goes outside and overhears Clarisse and her family talking about the way
life is in this hedonistic, illiterate society. Montag's mind is
bombarded with Clarisse's subversive thoughts and the memory of his
wife's near-death. Over the next few days, Clarisse faithfully meets
Montag each night as he walks home. She tells him about how her simple
pleasures and interests make her an outcast among her peers and how she
is forced to go to therapy for her behavior and thoughts. Montag looks
forward to these meetings, and just as he begins to expect them,
Clarisse goes missing. He senses something is wrong.
In the following days, while at work with the other firemen
ransacking the book-filled house of an old woman before the inevitable
burning, Montag steals a book before any of his coworkers notice. The
woman refuses to leave her house and her books, choosing instead to
light a match and burn herself alive.
Jarred by the woman's suicide, Montag returns home and hides the stolen
book under his pillow. Later, Montag wakes Mildred from her sleep and
asks her if she has seen or heard anything about Clarisse McClellan. She
reveals that Clarisse's family moved away after Clarisse was hit by a
speeding car and died four days ago. Dismayed by her failure to mention
this earlier, Montag uneasily tries to fall asleep. Outside he suspects
the presence of "The Mechanical Hound", an eight-legged robotic dog-like creature that resides in the firehouse and aids the firemen in hunting book hoarders.
Montag awakens ill the next morning. Mildred tries to care for
her husband but finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall"
entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls.
Montag suggests that maybe he should take a break from being a fireman
after what happened last night, and Mildred panics over the thought of
losing the house and her parlor wall "family". Captain Beatty, Montag's
fire chief, personally visits Montag to see how he is doing. Sensing his
concerns, Beatty recounts the history of how books lost their value and
how the firemen were adapted for their current role: over the course of
several decades, people began to embrace new media (in this case, film
and television), sports, and an ever-quickening pace of life. Books were
ruthlessly abridged or degraded to accommodate short attention spans
while minority groups protested the controversial, outdated content
they perceived in literature (yet comic books, trade papers, and sex
magazines remained, as these fed into the mainstream population's desire
for mindless entertainment). At the same time, advances in technology
resulted in nearly all buildings being made out of fireproof materials,
and the traditional role of firemen in preventing fires was no longer
necessary. The government instead turned the firemen into officers of
society's peace of mind: instead of putting out fires they became
responsible for starting them, specifically for the purpose of burning
books, which were condemned as sources of confusing and depressing
thoughts that only complicated people's lives. After an awkward
encounter between Millie and Montag over the book hidden under Montag's
pillow, Beatty becomes suspicious and casually adds a passing threat as
he leaves, telling Montag that if a fireman had a book, he would be
asked to burn it within the next 24 hours. If he refused, the other
firemen would come and burn his house down for him. The encounter leaves
Montag shaken.
After Beatty leaves, Montag reveals to Mildred that, over the
last year, he has accumulated a stash of books that he has kept hidden
in the air-conditioning duct in their ceiling. In a panic, Mildred grabs
a book and rushes to throw it in the kitchen incinerator. Montag
subdues her and tells her that the two of them are going to read the
books to see if they have value. If they do not, he promises the books
will be burned and all will return to normal.
"The Sieve and the Sand"
Montag
and Mildred discuss the stolen books, and Mildred refuses to go along
with it, questioning why she or anyone else should care about books.
Montag goes on a rant about Mildred's suicide attempt, Clarisse's
disappearance and death, the old woman who burned herself, and the
imminent threat of war that goes ignored by the masses. He suggests that
perhaps the books of the past have messages that can save society from
its own destruction. The conversation is interrupted by a call from
Mildred's friend, Mrs. Bowles, and they set up a date to watch the
"parlor walls" that night at Mildred's house.
Montag concedes that Mildred is a lost cause and he will need
help to understand the books. He remembers an old man named Faber, an
English professor before books were banned, whom he once met in a park.
Montag makes a subway trip to Faber's home along with a rare copy of the
Bible,
the book he stole at the woman's house. Once there, Montag forces the
scared and reluctant Faber into helping him by methodically ripping
pages from the Bible. Faber concedes and gives Montag a homemade
ear-piece communicator so he can offer constant guidance.
At home, Mildred's friends, Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps, arrive
to watch the "parlor walls". Not interested in this insipid
entertainment, Montag turns off the walls and tries to engage the women
in meaningful conversation, only for them to reveal just how
indifferent, ignorant, and callous they truly are. Enraged by their
idiocy, Montag leaves momentarily and returns with a book of poetry.
This confuses the women and alarms Faber, who is listening remotely.
Mildred tries to dismiss Montag's actions as a tradition firemen act out
once a year: they find an old book and read it as a way to make fun of
how silly the past is. Montag proceeds to recite the poem Dover Beach,
causing Mrs. Phelps to cry. At the behest of Faber in the ear-piece,
Montag burns the book. Mildred's friends leave in disgust, while Mildred
takes more sleeping pills.
Montag hides his books in the backyard before returning to the
firehouse late at night with just the stolen Bible. He finds Beatty
playing cards with the other firemen. Montag hands Beatty a book to
cover for the one he believes Beatty knows he stole the night before,
which is unceremoniously tossed into the trash. Beatty tells Montag that
he had a dream in which they fought endlessly by quoting books to each
other. Thus Beatty reveals that, despite his disillusionment, he was
once an enthusiastic reader. A fire alarm sounds, and Beatty picks up
the address from the dispatcher system. They drive recklessly in the
fire truck to the destination: Montag's house.
"Burning Bright"
Beatty
orders Montag to destroy his own house, telling him that his wife and
her friends reported him after what happened the other night. Montag
watches as Mildred walks out of the house, too traumatized about losing
her parlor wall family to even acknowledge her husband's existence or
the situation going on around her, and catches a taxi. Montag obeys the
chief, destroying the home piece by piece with a flamethrower,
but Beatty discovers Montag's ear-piece and plans to hunt down Faber.
Montag threatens Beatty with the flamethrower and, after Beatty taunts
him, burns his boss alive and knocks his coworkers unconscious. As
Montag escapes the scene, the Mechanical Hound attacks him, managing to
inject his leg with a tranquilizer. He destroys the Hound with the
flamethrower and limps away. Before he escapes, however, he realizes
that Beatty had wanted to die a long time ago and had purposely goaded
Montag as well as provided him with a weapon.
Montag runs through the city streets towards Faber's house. Faber
urges him to make his way to the countryside and contact the exiled book-lovers who live there. He mentions he will be leaving on an early bus heading to St. Louis
and that he and Montag can rendezvous there later. On Faber's
television, they watch news reports of another Mechanical Hound being
released, with news helicopters following it to create a public
spectacle. After wiping his scent from around the house in hopes of
thwarting the Hound, Montag leaves Faber's house. He escapes the manhunt
by wading into a river and floating downstream. Montag leaves the river
in the countryside, where he meets the exiled drifters, led by a man
named Granger. Granger shows Montag the ongoing manhunt on a portable
battery TV and predicts that “Montag” will be caught within the next few
minutes; as predicted, an innocent man is then caught and killed.
The drifters are all former intellectuals. They have each
memorized books should the day arrive that society comes to an end and
is forced to rebuild itself anew, with the survivors learning to embrace
the literature of the past. Granger asks Montag what he has to
contribute to the group and Montag finds that he had partially memorized
the Book of Ecclesiastes.
While learning the philosophy of the exiles, Montag and the group watch
helplessly as bombers fly overhead and annihilate the city with nuclear
weapons: the imminent war has begun and ended in the same night. While
Faber would have left on the early bus, everyone else (including
Mildred) is immediately killed. Montag and the group are injured and
dirtied, but manage to survive the shockwave.
The following morning, Granger teaches Montag and the others about the legendary phoenix
and its endless cycle of long life, death in flames, and rebirth. He
adds that the phoenix must have some relationship to mankind, which
constantly repeats its mistakes, but explains that man has something the
phoenix does not: mankind can remember its mistakes and try never to
repeat them. Granger then muses that a large factory of mirrors should
be built so that people can take a long look at themselves and reflect
on their lives. When the meal is over, the exiles return to the city to
rebuild society.
Characters
- Guy Montag is the protagonist and a fireman who presents the dystopian world in which he lives first through the eyes of a worker loyal to it, then as a man in conflict about it, and eventually as someone resolved to be free of it. Through most of the book, Montag lacks knowledge and believes only what he hears.
- Clarisse McClellan is a young girl one month short of her 17th birthday who is Montag's neighbor. She walks with Montag on his trips home from work. She is an unusual sort of person compared to the others inhabiting the bookless, hedonistic society: outgoing, naturally cheerful, unorthodox, and intuitive. She is unpopular among peers and disliked by teachers for asking "why" instead of "how" and focusing on nature rather than on technology. A few days after her first meeting with Montag, she disappears without any explanation; Mildred tells Montag (and Captain Beatty confirms) that Clarisse was hit by a speeding car and that her family moved away following her death. In the afterword of a later edition, Bradbury notes that the film adaptation changed the ending so that Clarisse (who, in the film, is now a 20-year-old schoolteacher who was fired for being unorthodox) was living with the exiles. Bradbury, far from being displeased by this, was so happy with the new ending that he wrote it into his later stage edition.
- Mildred "Millie" Montag is Guy Montag's wife. She is addicted to sleeping pills, absorbed in the shallow dramas played on her "parlor walls" (flat-panel televisions), and indifferent to the oppressive society around her. She is described in the book as "thin as a praying mantis from dieting, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, and her flesh like white bacon." Despite her husband's attempts to break her from the spell society has on her, Mildred continues to be shallow and indifferent. After Montag scares her friends away by reading Dover Beach, and finding herself unable to live with someone who has been hoarding books, Mildred betrays Montag by reporting him to the firemen and abandoning him, and dies when the city is bombed.
- Captain Beatty is Montag's boss and the book's main antagonist. Once an avid reader, he has come to hate books due to their unpleasant content and contradicting facts and opinions. After attempting to force Montag to burn his house, Montag kills him with a flamethrower, only to later realize that Beatty had given him the flamethrower and goaded him on purpose so that Montag would kill him. However, it is still unclear whether or not Beatty was ever on Montag's side, or if he was just suicidal. In a scene written years later by Bradbury for the Fahrenheit 451 play, Beatty invites Montag to his house where he shows him walls of books left to molder on their shelves.
- Stoneman and Black are Montag's coworkers at the firehouse. They do not have a large impact on the story and function only to show the reader the contrast between the firemen who obediently do as they are told and someone like Montag, who formerly took pride in his job but subsequently realizes how damaging it is to society. Black is later framed by Montag for possessing books.
- Faber is a former English professor. He has spent years regretting that he did not defend books when he saw the moves to ban them. Montag turns to him for guidance, remembering him from a chance meeting in a park sometime earlier. Faber at first refuses to help Montag, and later realizes Montag is only trying to learn about books, not destroy them. He secretly communicates with Montag through an electronic ear-piece and helps Montag escape the city, then gets on a bus to St. Louis and escapes the city himself before it is bombed. Bradbury notes in his afterword that Faber is part of the name of a German manufacturer of pencils, Faber-Castell.
- Mrs. Ann Bowles and Mrs. Clara Phelps are Mildred's friends and representative of the anti-intellectual, hedonistic mainstream society presented in the novel. During a social visit to Montag's house, they brag about ignoring the bad things in their lives and have a cavalier attitude towards the upcoming war, their husbands, their children, and politics. Mrs. Phelps' husband Pete was called in to fight in the upcoming war (and believes that he'll be back in a week because of how quick the war will be) and thinks having children serves no purpose other than to ruin lives. Mrs. Bowles is a thrice-married single mother. Her first husband divorced her, her second died in a jet accident, and her third committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. She has two children who do not like or respect her due to her permissive, often negligent and abusive parenting; Mrs. Bowles brags that her kids beat her up, and she's glad she can hit back. When Montag reads Dover Beach to them, he strikes a chord in Mrs. Phelps, who starts crying over how hollow her life is. Mrs. Bowles chastises Montag for reading "silly awful hurting words".
- Granger is the leader of a group of wandering intellectual exiles who memorize books in order to preserve their contents.
Title
The title page of the book explains the title as follows: Fahrenheit 451—The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns.... On inquiring about the temperature at which paper would catch fire, Bradbury had been told that 451 °F (233 °C) was the autoignition temperature of paper.
In various studies, scientists have placed the autoignition temperature
at a range of temperatures between 424 and 475 °F (218 and 246 °C),
depending on the type of paper.
Historical context
Bradbury's
lifelong passion for books began at an early age. After graduating from
high school, Bradbury's family could not afford for him to attend
college so Bradbury began spending time at the Los Angeles Public
Library where he essentially educated himself.
As a frequent visitor to his local libraries in the 1920s and 1930s, he
recalls being disappointed because they did not stock popular science
fiction novels, like those of H. G. Wells, because, at the time, they were not deemed literary enough. Between this and learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria,
a great impression was made on the young man about the vulnerability of
books to censure and destruction. Later, as a teenager, Bradbury was
horrified by the Nazi book burnings and later by Joseph Stalin's campaign of political repression, the "Great Purge", in which writers and poets, among many others, were arrested and often executed.
Shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of World War II, the United States focused its concern on the Soviet atomic bomb project and the expansion of communism. The House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC), formed in 1938 to investigate American citizens and
organizations suspected of having communist ties, held hearings in 1947
to investigate alleged communist influence in Hollywood movie-making.
These hearings resulted in the blacklisting of the so-called "Hollywood Ten",
a group of influential screenwriters and directors. This governmental
interference in the affairs of artists and creative types greatly
angered Bradbury.
Bradbury was bitter and concerned about the workings of his government,
and a late 1949 nighttime encounter with an overzealous police officer
would inspire Bradbury to write "The Pedestrian", a short story which would go on to become "The Fireman" and then Fahrenheit 451. The rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy's hearings hostile to accused communists, beginning in 1950, deepened Bradbury's contempt for government overreach.
The year HUAC began investigating Hollywood is often considered the beginning of the Cold War, as in March 1947, the Truman Doctrine was announced. By about 1950, the Cold War was in full swing, and the American public's fear of nuclear warfare and communist influence was at a feverish level. The stage was set for Bradbury to write the dramatic nuclear holocaust ending of Fahrenheit 451, exemplifying the type of scenario feared by many Americans of the time.
Bradbury's early life witnessed the Golden Age of Radio, while the transition to the Golden Age of Television began right around the time he started to work on the stories that would eventually lead to Fahrenheit 451.
Bradbury saw these forms of media as a threat to the reading of books,
indeed as a threat to society, as he believed they could act as a
distraction from important affairs. This contempt for mass media and technology would express itself through Mildred and her friends and is an important theme in the book.
Writing and development
Fahrenheit 451
developed out of a series of ideas Bradbury had visited in previously
written stories. For many years, he tended to single out "The
Pedestrian" in interviews and lectures as sort of a proto-Fahrenheit 451. In the Preface of his 2006 anthology Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451 he states that this is an oversimplification. The full genealogy of Fahrenheit 451 given in Match to Flame is involved. The following covers the most salient aspects.
Between 1947 and 1948, Bradbury wrote the short story "Bright Phoenix" (not published until the May 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) about a librarian who confronts a book-burning "Chief Censor" named Jonathan Barnes.
In late 1949, Bradbury was stopped and questioned by a police officer while walking late one night. When asked "What are you doing?", Bradbury wisecracked, "Putting one foot in front of another." This incident inspired Bradbury to write the 1951 short story "The Pedestrian".
In The Pedestrian, Leonard Mead is harassed and detained
by the city's remotely operated police cruiser (there's only one) for
taking nighttime walks, something that has become extremely rare in this
future-based setting: everybody else stays inside and watches
television ("viewing screens"). Alone and without an alibi, Mead is taken to the "Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies" for his peculiar habit. Fahrenheit 451 would later echo this theme of an authoritarian society distracted by broadcast media.
Bradbury expanded the book-burning premise of "Bright Phoenix" and the totalitarian future of "The Pedestrian" into "The Fireman", a novella published in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. "The Fireman" was written in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library on a typewriter that he rented for a fee of ten cents per half hour. The first draft was 25,000 words long and was completed in nine days.
Urged by a publisher at Ballantine Books to double the length of his story to make a novel, Bradbury returned to the same typing room and expanded his work into Fahrenheit 451, again taking just nine days. The fixup was published by Ballantine in 1953.
Supplementary material
Bradbury has supplemented the novel with various front and back matter, including a 1979 coda, a 1982 afterword, a 1993 foreword, and several introductions.
Publication history
The
first U.S. printing was a paperback version from October 1953 by The
Ballantine Publishing Group. Shortly after the paperback, a hardback
version was released that included a special edition of 200 signed and
numbered copies bound in asbestos. These were technically collections because the novel was published with two short stories: The Playground and And the Rock Cried Out, which have been absent in later printings. A few months later, the novel was serialized in the March, April, and May 1954 issues of nascent Playboy magazine.
Expurgation
Starting in January 1967, Fahrenheit 451 was subject to expurgation by its publisher, Ballantine Books with the release of the "Bal-Hi Edition" aimed at high school students. Among the changes made by the publisher were the censorship of the words "hell", "damn", and "abortion"; the modification of seventy-five passages; and the changing of two episodes.
In the one case, a drunk man became a "sick man" while cleaning fluff out of a human navel became "cleaning ears" in the other.
For a while both the censored and uncensored versions were available
concurrently but by 1973 Ballantine was publishing only the censored
version. This continued until 1979 when it came to Bradbury's attention:
In 1979, one of Bradbury's friends showed him an expurgated copy. Bradbury demanded that Ballantine Books withdraw that version and replace it with the original, and in 1980 the original version once again became available. In this reinstated work, in the Author's Afterword, Bradbury relates to the reader that it is not uncommon for a publisher to expurgate an author's work, but he asserts that he himself will not tolerate the practice of manuscript "mutilation".
The "Bal-Hi" editions are now referred to by the publisher as the "Revised Bal-Hi" editions.
Non-print publications
An audiobook version read by Bradbury himself was released in 1976 and received a Spoken Word Grammy nomination. Another audiobook was released in 2005 narrated by Christopher Hurt. The e-book version was released in December 2011.
Reception
In 1954, Galaxy Science Fiction reviewer Groff Conklin placed the novel "among the great works of the imagination written in English in the last decade or more." The Chicago Sunday Tribune's August Derleth
described the book as "a savage and shockingly prophetic view of one
possible future way of life", calling it "compelling" and praising
Bradbury for his "brilliant imagination". Over half a century later, Sam Weller wrote, "upon its publication, Fahrenheit 451 was hailed as a visionary work of social commentary." Today, Fahrenheit 451 is still viewed as an important cautionary tale about conformity and the evils of government censorship.
When the novel was first published, there were those who did not find merit in the tale. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas
were less enthusiastic, faulting the book for being "simply padded,
occasionally with startlingly ingenious gimmickry, ... often with
coruscating cascades of verbal brilliance [but] too often merely with
words." Reviewing the book for Astounding Science Fiction, P. Schuyler Miller
characterized the title piece as "one of Bradbury's bitter, almost
hysterical diatribes," while praising its "emotional drive and
compelling, nagging detail." Similarly, The New York Times
was unimpressed with the novel and further accused Bradbury of
developing a "virulent hatred for many aspects of present-day culture,
namely, such monstrosities as radio, TV, most movies, amateur and
professional sports, automobiles, and other similar aberrations which he
feels debase the bright simplicity of the thinking man's existence."
Censorship/banning incidents
In the years since its publication, Fahrenheit 451
has occasionally been banned, censored, or redacted in some schools by
parents and teaching staff either unaware of or indifferent to the
inherent irony in such censorship. The following are some notable
incidents:
- In 1987, Fahrenheit 451 was given "third tier" status by the Bay County School Board in Panama City, Florida under then-superintendent Leonard Hall's new three-tier classification system. Third tier was meant for books to be removed from the classroom for "a lot of vulgarity". After a resident class-action lawsuit, a media stir, and student protests, the school board abandoned their tier-based censorship system and approved all the currently used books.
- In 1992, Venado Middle School in Irvine, California gave copies of Fahrenheit 451 to students with all "obscene" words blacked out. Parents contacted the local media and succeeded in reinstalling the uncensored copies.
- In 2006, parents of a 10th-grade high school student in Montgomery County, Texas demanded the book be banned from their daughter's English class reading list. Their daughter was assigned the book during Banned Books Week, but stopped reading several pages in due to the offensive language and description of the burning of the Bible. In addition, the parents protested the violence, portrayal of Christians, and depictions of firemen in the novel.
Themes
Discussions about Fahrenheit 451 often center on its story
foremost as a warning against state-based censorship. Indeed, when
Bradbury wrote the novel during the McCarthy era, he was concerned about censorship in the United States. During a radio interview in 1956, Bradbury said:
I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.
As time went by, Bradbury tended to dismiss censorship as a chief
motivating factor for writing the story. Instead he usually claimed that
the real messages of Fahrenheit 451 were about the dangers of an
illiterate society infatuated with mass media and the threat of
minority and special interest groups to books. In the late 1950s,
Bradbury recounted:
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
This story echoes Mildred's "Seashell ear-thimbles" (i.e., a brand of
in-ear headphones) that act as an emotional barrier between her and
Montag. In a 2007 interview, Bradbury maintained that people
misinterpret his book and that Fahrenheit 451 is really a statement on how mass media like television marginalizes the reading of literature. Regarding minorities, he wrote in his 1979 Coda:
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. [...] Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever. [...] Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel, which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.
Book-burning censorship, Bradbury would argue, was a side-effect of
these two primary factors; this is consistent with Captain Beatty's
speech to Montag about the history of the firemen. According to
Bradbury, it is the people, not the state, who are the culprit in Fahrenheit 451. Nevertheless, the role of censorship, state-based or otherwise, is still perhaps the most frequent theme explored in the work.
A variety of other themes in the novel besides censorship have
been suggested. Two major themes are resistance to conformity and
control of individuals via technology and mass media. Bradbury explores
how the government is able to use mass media to influence society and
suppress individualism through book burning. The characters Beatty and
Faber point out that the American population is to blame. Due to their
constant desire for a simplistic, positive image, books must be
suppressed. Beatty blames the minority groups, who would take offense to
published works that displayed them in an unfavorable light. Faber went
further to state that the American population simply stopped reading on
their own. He notes that the book burnings themselves became a form of
entertainment for the general public.
Predictions for the future
Bradbury described himself as "a preventor of futures, not a predictor of them." He did not believe that book burning was an inevitable part of the future; he wanted to warn against its development. In a later interview, when asked if he believes that teaching Fahrenheit 451 in schools will prevent his totalitarian
vision of the future, Bradbury replied in the negative. Rather, he
states that education must be at the kindergarten and first-grade level.
If students are unable to read then, they will be unable to read Fahrenheit 451.
In terms of technology, Sam Weller notes that Bradbury "predicted
everything from flat-panel televisions to earbud headphones and
twenty-four-hour banking machines."
Adaptations
Television
Playhouse 90 broadcast "A Sound of Different Drummers" on CBS in 1957, written by Robert Alan Aurthur. The play combined plot ideas from Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bradbury sued and eventually won on appeal.
Film
A film adaptation written and directed by François Truffaut and starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie was released in 1966.
A new film adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani and starring Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, Sofia Boutella, and Lilly Singh was released in 2018 for HBO.
Theater
In the late 1970s Bradbury adapted his book into a play. At least part of it was performed at the Colony Theatre in Los Angeles in 1979, but it was not in print until 1986 and the official world premiere was only in November 1988 by the Fort Wayne, Indiana Civic Theatre.
The stage adaptation diverges considerably from the book and seems
influenced by Truffaut's movie. For example, fire chief Beatty's
character is fleshed out and is the wordiest role in the play. As in the
movie, Clarisse does not simply disappear but in the finale meets up
with Montag as a book character (she as Robert Louis Stevenson, he as Edgar Allan Poe).
The UK premiere of Bradbury's stage adaptation was not until 2003 in Nottingham, while it took until 2006 before the Godlight Theatre Company produced and performed its New York City premiere at 59E59 Theaters. After the completion of the New York run, the production then transferred to the Edinburgh Festival where it was a 2006 Edinburgh Festival Pick of the Fringe.
The Off-Broadway theatre The American Place Theatre presented a one man show adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 as a part of their 2008–2009 Literature to Life season.
Fahrenheit 451 inspired the Birmingham Repertory Theatre production Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine, which was performed at the Birmingham Central Library in April 2012.
Radio
BBC Radio produced a one-off dramatization of the novel in 1982 starring Michael Pennington. It was broadcast again on February 12, 2012, and April 7 and 8, 2013, on BBC Radio 4 Extra.
Computer games
In 1984, the novel was adapted into a computer text adventure game of the same name by the software company Trillium.Comics
In June 2009, a graphic novel edition of the book was published. Entitled Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation, the paperback graphic adaptation was illustrated by Tim Hamilton. The introduction in the novel is written by Bradbury.
Cultural references
Michael Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 refers to Bradbury's novel and the September 11 attacks, emphasized by the film's tagline "The temperature where freedom burns". The film takes a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and its coverage in the news media, and became the highest grossing documentary of all time. Bradbury was upset by what he considered the appropriation of his title, and wanted the film renamed.
In 2015, the Internet Engineering Steering Group approved the publication of An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles, now RFC 7725, which specifies that websites forced to block resources for legal reasons should return a status code of 451 when users request those resources.
Centigrade 232 is a poem by Robert Calvert, published in a 1977 book and released as an album in 2007. The title alludes to Fahrenheit 451 by its metric equivalent, "signifying the writer destroying his rough drafts".
In book 14 of the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series by Kathryn Lasky, published in 2008, Braithe states that the name of the Place of Living Books, also called Brad,
comes from an author's name: "The author's full name is not known. We
call him Ray Brad. We think it's only scraps of his name but what is
important is that he wrote about book burning", thus referencing Fahrenheit 451.
