Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
The classic dystopian novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization’s enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.
Bradbury’s powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which, decades on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
Bradbury resisted the censorship reading, most explicitly in a 2007 LA Weekly interview where he said the book was about television eroding the appetite for reading, and he reportedly walked out of a UCLA class whose students insisted otherwise. The fire chief's big speech backs him up: people gave up books voluntarily, choosing speed and pleasure and a wish not to offend anyone before any decree arrived. The most persuasive case against reading in the novel comes from a well-read man, so treat it as a debate about how a society talks itself out of reading. The prose divides readers. Some find the metaphor-per-page style florid; others think the intensity is essential to the atmosphere.
Early reviews split: Galaxy's Groff Conklin ranked it among the best imaginative works in English of the preceding decade and August Derleth called it shockingly prophetic, while Boucher and McComas judged it padded and a New York Times review accused Bradbury of bitter hostility toward contemporary culture. The NEA Big Read guide, by contrast, describes a rapturous reception and steady sales, so how warm 1953 was depends on whose account you trust. It later became a school and library staple, and the NEA guide notes some critics rank Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles above it for subtlety of language.
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Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.
