Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
Summary
Guy Montag works as a fireman in a future America where firemen burn books rather than put out fires, a job he has never questioned until his teenage neighbor Clarisse McClellan asks him, in passing, whether he is happy. He is not, though it takes him time to admit it: his wife Mildred overdoses on sleeping pills the same week, technicians who treat overdoses so routinely they barely look up from their equipment save her, and Montag begins secretly stealing and hoarding books from the houses he is sent to burn. After Montag watches an old woman choose to be burned alive with her books rather than surrender them, and after Clarisse disappears, apparently killed, his own wife eventually reports his hidden library to the authorities. Fire Captain Beatty, revealed to be someone who once loved books himself before turning against them, orders Montag to burn his own house down, and Montag, cornered, kills Beatty with his flamethrower instead and flees the city. He finds a community of exiles living along the railroad tracks who have each memorized an entire book to preserve it, becoming a walking library themselves, and Montag chooses the Book of Ecclesiastes as his own. The novel ends as the city Montag fled is destroyed in a sudden nuclear war, and the exiles turn back toward the ruins to help rebuild, carrying what they have memorized with them.
Bradbury writes in a compressed, incantatory style, short chapters and short sentences that read almost as fast as the fires they describe, and the book's fury is less about government censorship specifically than about a public that stopped wanting to read at all, watched entire walls of television instead, and asked to have books banned because complicated ideas made people unhappy, an argument some readers find prophetic and others find lets easier villains like political censorship off the hook.
Bradbury wrote the first draft, then called The Fireman, in nine days on a rented typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library, paying ten cents for every half hour of use, then doubled its length in another nine days in the same room before turning it into the novel Ballantine published.
Historical Context & Significance
Ballantine Books published Fahrenheit 451 on October 19, 1953, and it won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal, both in 1954. The Hugo Award had been presented for the first time only weeks earlier, in September 1953, and was not given at all in 1954; when the World Science Fiction Society finally handed out Retro Hugos in 2004 to fill that gap, Fahrenheit 451 won Best Novel for 1954. Groff Conklin called it among the great works of the imagination written in English, though Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas found it simply padded, and Bradbury's own publisher, without telling him, quietly cut the words hell, damn and abortion along with about seventy five passages for a 1967 school edition; Bradbury discovered the cuts only in 1979 and demanded the original text restored.
The book has been challenged repeatedly in American schools and adapted for the screen twice, by Francois Truffaut in 1966 and again by HBO in 2018, along with stage, radio and even a 1984 interactive fiction game Bradbury co wrote himself. It remains, by the New York Public Library's own count, among the seven most checked out books it has ever carried.