History and Meaning of Fahrenheit 451

There must be something in books, something we cant imagine, to make a woman stay
in a burning house; there must be something there. You dont stay for nothing. This a quote
from the author of the book Fahrenheit 451 and the author is talking about a scene within the
book where a woman is preparing to die with her books. Fahrenheit 451 tells a story about the
importance of true feeling, and of true knowledge and imagination. In the book a man questions
everything that he has dedicated his life for, and wants to know the truth as to why the society is
the way it is. Since he was a child Ray Bradbury, the author of the book,was a huge fan of
adventure and science fiction, which made him wonder about the future of our world.
Ray Bradbury was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. Ray Bradbury decided to
be a writer when he was about 12 to 13, and if he was to not become a writer he would have
been a magician . Bradbury then later moved to Los Angeles as a teenager, at the school that
Ray had gone to he participated in the school drama. This is where he wrote his first play he
had ever written. After Ray graduated from High School he did not go to college simply because
he could not afford it, so he spent hours at the library. To support himself Bradbury sold
newspaper as he wrote. He published his first short story in 1938 the same year that Ray
graduated from high school. The next year he published four issues of his own fan magazine.
The way that Ray Bradbury wondered about the world is shown with the stories that he
has written. Ray sold his first professional story Pendulum in November of 1941, in the same
year he married his wife Marguerite Mcclure. In 1950, Ray Bradbury published his first major
literary work The Martian Chronicles, which was about the conflict between humans colonizing
the red planet and the native Martians that they encountered. By many his work was Science
Fiction, but Bradbury considered it himself it to be fantasy. Television and comic book
adaptations of Bradbury's began to appear(1951) which introduced him to a wider audience.
Ray Bradbury's most known and awarded piece of work is Fahrenheit 451( 1953). This
`book became an instant classic in the era of McCarthyism( which is the books about the
government and politics) for its exploration of themes of censorship and conformity. Later on
Ray Bradbury stated that censorship was the main theme of Fahrenheit 451 explaining the book
as a story about how television drives away the interest in reading. In the book is about
mankind who are killing something very special: books. The death of living words emerges from
a world without hope or meaning within the book. But Bradbury soon realized that predicting
this kind of dark future that the book gives off is a ran counter to his creative instincts. He
became more effective at exploring the sources and celebrating the achievements of the human
imagination, and gradually began to examine where present day threats to creativity might lead
. Fahrenheit 451 tells an amazing story about a man named Montag who is a fireman and has
dedicated his life to burning books, the only thing in this society that leads to knowledge,
imagination and creativity. Montag then soon realized that the world is not what it seems, he
then started to question everything that he once thought, what he once dedicated his life to. This
dystopian fantasy thinks about the human race within the future, and about how creativity and
imagination is something that you simply should not destroy. Throughout the book Montag
meets people on the way, especially a young girl, who has him start thinking about how wrong

the society is. His wife Mildred who is there but not all there, she pays more attention to a
screen then the real world. Montag is then captivated by books, and he is hiding that he has
once read a book. Books are like people.
Within this book Bradbury has a very poetic and meaningful style of writing where in the
book he describes everything in great detail and great depths. Ray Bradbury also puts his own
touch of what it was like to live in the 50s. Within the book he describes that books were
banned, well in the 1950s some books where band to the public, the government would not let
the people read certain kinds of books. This is a lot like the book because books were banned in
general people could not read at all, because the government thought it was bad for the people,
and in a way they were trying to distract people with television. Within this book Ray Bradbury
uses his sense of reality within the book. Within the book the main big part was the burning of
books. The intellectual holocaust of Stalins Russia, which Arthur Koestler wrote about,
recharged Bradburys own conviction that literature is every bit as precious as life itself. From a
young age Bradbury was greatly affected by the accounts of the burning of the ancient library at
Alexandria and the loss of many classical works that we now know only by the title or through
fragments of surviving parchment. Bradbury sees book shelves as populations of living authors
he said to burn the book is to burn the author, and to burn the author is to deny our own
humanity.(pg 167) The burning of those books and Arthur inspired Bradbury to write Fahrenheit
451. People have often asked me what effect Huxley and Orwell had on me, had on me,
whether either of them influenced the creation of Fahrenheit 451. The best response is Arthur
Koestler . Only a few perceived the intellectual holocaust and the revolution by burial that Stalin
achieved. Only Koestler got the full range of desecration, execution, and forgetfulness on a
mass and nameless graveyard scale. Koestlers Darkness at noon therefore true father,
mother, and lunatic brother to my F.451.
Fahrenheit 451 is a certain take on what the future may be like. It was a prediction as to
what the next generations may become. The unsettling image-the death of living wordsemerges from a world without hope or meaning, but Bradbury soon realized that pretending this
kind of dark future ran counter to his creative instincts. He was more effective at exploring the
sources and celebrating the achievements of the human imagination, gradually began to
examine where present day threats as to where creativity might lead. As I read this book and
as I read more about Ray Bradbury I found that he was just writing about his reality, what was
happening in his time is something that he explained within the book but it was in the future;
within in the book though its more advanced because its the future its a lot like his reality, but in
a way worse. In the book people are distracted by tv and a non-reality; that is how his society
and ours is.
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