FAHRENHEIT 451 is not a slow burn

This book is as relevant today as when first published in 1953. Good books by great authors always are.

This is one of the few movie-tie-in books that I actually bought when I was in college. I highly recommend it along with the 1966 film directed by Francois Truffaut starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie. I checked to see if it would be on this month, but no luck.






Click on any image to see it larger.

Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury. The novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed.

The novel has been the subject of 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, but a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which leads to a perception of knowledge as being composed of factoids, partial information devoid of context.

François Truffaut wrote and directed a film adaptation of the novel in 1966. At least two BBC Radio 4 dramatizations have also been aired, both of which follow the book very closely.

In 1947, Bradbury wrote a short story titled "Bright Phoenix" (later revised for publication in a 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction). Bradbury expanded the basic premise of "Bright Phoenix" into The Fireman, a novella published in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. First published in 1953 by Ballantine Books, Fahrenheit 451 is twice as long as "The Fireman." A few months later, the novel was serialized in the March, April, and May 1954 issues of Playboy. Bradbury wrote the entire novel in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library on a pay typewriter that he rented for a fee of ten cents per half an hour. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

Click here to see a video showing much more interesting scenes than the rather hokey trailer above.

(Photo below of Ray Bradbury by Alan Light)

Ray Douglas Bradbury (born August 22, 1920) is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th and 21st century American writers of speculative fiction. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into television shows or films.

Bradbury was born in 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois to Esther Moberg Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant, and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a power and telephone lineman.

Ray Bradbury is related to the American Shakespeare scholar Douglas Spaulding. He is also directly descended from Mary Bradbury, who was tried, convicted and sentenced to hang as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. She was married to Captain Thomas Bradbury of Salisbury, Massachusetts.

Bradbury was a reader and writer throughout his youth who was greatly influenced by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Bradbury was especially impressed with Poe's ability to draw readers into his works. In his youth, he spent much time in the Carnegie library in Waukegan, Illinois, reading such authors as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and his favorite author, Edgar Rice Burroughs who wrote novels such as Tarzan of the Apes and The Warlord of Mars. He loved Burroughs' The Warlord of Mars so much that at the age of twelve he wrote his own sequel. An aunt read him short stories when he was a child. He used this library as a setting for much of his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, and depicted Waukegan as "Green Town" in some of his other semi-autobiographical novels—Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer—as well as in many of his short stories.

He attributes to two incidents his lifelong habit of writing every day. The first of these, occurring when he was three years old, was his mother's taking him to see Lon Chaney's performance in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The second incident occurred in 1932, when a carnival entertainer, one Mr. Electrico, touched the young man on the nose with an electrified sword, made his hair stand on end, and shouted, "Live forever!" It was from then that Bradbury wanted to live forever and decided on his career as an author in order to do what he was told: live forever. It was at that age that Bradbury first started to do magic. Magic was his first great love. If he had not discovered writing, he would have become a magician.

The Bradbury family lived in Tucson, Arizona in 1926–27 and 1932–33 as the father pursued employment, each time returning to Waukegan, but eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1934, when Ray was thirteen.

Bradbury graduated from Los Angeles High School, where he took poetry and short story writing courses that furthered his interest in writing, but he did not attend college. Instead, he sold newspapers at the corner of South Norton Avenue and Olympic Boulevard. In regard to his education, Bradbury said:

“Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

It was in UCLA's Powell Library, in a study room with typewriters for rent, that Bradbury wrote his classic story of a book-burning future, Fahrenheit 451. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

Visit Ray Bradbury's site here.