Fahrenheit 451
Historical Context

Preface

Introduction

Historical Context

About the Author

Other Works/Adaptations

Discussion Questions

Additional Resources

Credits

Teacher's Guide

The Life and Times of Ray Bradbury

THE 1920s
Ray Bradbury is born on August 22, 1920.
Yevgeny Zamyatin completes his influential science-fiction novel We.
First issue of Amazing Stories comes out in 1926. Bradbury will be among early subscribers.

THE 1930s
Bradbury starts writing his own Buck Rogers stories.
Orson Welles delivers "War of the Worlds" broadcast.
Nazis burn books across Germany; newsreel footage appalls teenage Bradbury.

THE 1940s
Bradbury marries Marguerite McClure in 1947 and publishes his first book, Dark Carnival.
Orwell's 1984 published.
House Un-American Activities Committee investigates the movie industry.

THE 1950s
Bradbury publishes The Martian Chronicles in 1950 and Fahrenheit 451 in 1953.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. breaks into Galaxy magazine.
Cold War imperils writers' civil liberties in the U.S. and their lives in the Soviet Union.

THE 1960s
Bradbury receives an Oscar nomination for animated short Icarus Montgolfier Wright, 1962.
Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and Star Trek hook a new generation on science fiction.
Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451 opens, starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie.

THE 1970s
Bradbury awarded lifetime World Fantasy Award.
Apollo 15 crew names Dandelion Crater for Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.
Star Wars opens in 1977, the last time anyone will think of science fiction as a cult genre.

THE 1980s
Bradbury receives lifetime PEN Center USA West award.
William Gibson pioneers science-fiction subgenre cyberpunk.
Fifteen more books from Bradbury, including horror collection The Toynbee Convector.

THE 1990s
Bradbury writes his memoir Green Shadows, White Whale about scripting Moby Dick.
Many science-fiction magazines shift to online format.
Bradbury suffers a near-fatal stroke in 1999. He polishes his first mystery while still in the hospital.

THE 2000s
More honors: National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the National Medal of Arts.
Bradbury's wife dies in 2003.
Sam Weller's biography, The Bradbury Chronicles, appears in 2005.
Bradbury's adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 opens off Broadway in 2006.

Literature and Censorship

"The paper burns, but the words fly away." These words about bookburning from the martyred rabbi Akiba Ben Joseph appear on one wall of Ray Bradbury's beloved Los Angeles Public Library—itself the survivor of a horrific 1986 fire. They also underscore a truth too often ignored: Censorship almost never works. Banning or burning a book may take it out of circulation temporarily, but it usually makes people even more curious to read the work in question. Under Josef Stalin and his successors, Russians banned questionable books and killed or imprisoned their authors, yet underground or samizdat editions passed from hand to hand and ultimately helped topple the Soviet system. Adolf Hitler exhorted his followers to burn books by Jewish or "subversive" authors, but the best of those books have outlasted Nazi Germany by a good sixty years. In an added irony, accounts of Nazi book burnings helped inspire Fahrenheit 451, one of the most haunting denunciations of censorship in all literature.

How ironic, too, that Bradbury's own indictment of censorship has itself been repeatedly censored. Fourteen years after Fahrenheit 451' s initial release, some educators succeeded in persuading its publisher to release a special edition. This edition modified more than 75 passages to eliminate mild curse words, and to "clean up" two incidents in the book. (A minor character, for example, was changed from "drunk" to "sick.") When Bradbury learned of the changes, he demanded that the publishers withdraw the censored version, and they complied. Since 1980, only Bradbury's original text has been available. As a result, some schools have banned the book from course lists. For all these attempts to sanitize or banish it completely, Bradbury has remained diligent in his defense of his masterpiece, writing in a coda that appears in some editions of the book:

"Do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book."

Other frequently censored books

The Grapes of Wrath
Consistently ranked among the most often banned books in the American literary canon, John Steinbeck's novel has faced countless challenges from library systems and school districts. Among the most common complaints are its depictions of rural people as, to quote one petition, "low, ignorant, profane, and blasphemous."

To Kill a Mockingbird
The Committee on Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association has listed Harper Lee's book as one of the ten most commonly challenged. Many school districts have banned it for its racial slurs and the occasional mild swear word.

A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway's third novel was a popular and critical success, though authorities in America and abroad disagreed. The book initially appeared as a five-part series in Scribner's Magazine, which Boston city officials banned as obscene. In Italy, it was deemed unpatriotic for its unflattering, and accurate, account of the Italian Army's retreat from Caporetto.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Concord, Massachusetts, Public Library proscribed Mark Twain's enduring masterpiece as "trash suitable only for the slums" when it first came out in 1885. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People demanded its removal from New York City high schools in 1957 for a new reason: alleged racist content.