Fahrenheit 451

The American writer Ray Bradbury published the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 in 1953. Its setting is a future United States where books are illegal and firemen destroy any they find, and its central character is Guy Montag, a fireman who loses faith in that work and ends up helping to save what is being destroyed. The title refers to the temperature at which book paper catches and burns.

Montag comes home to a wife who lives inside wall-sized screens and a machine that pumps her stomach clean, and he meets a teenager next door who asks him whether he is happy. That question, and the woman who stays in a burning house with her books, starts him reading and then hiding what he reads. The society around him gave up on difficult things voluntarily, and the firemen exist to make sure nobody changes their mind.

Bradbury wrote the novel in the era of the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism, and he cited two influences on it: the Nazi book burnings and the ideological repression of the Soviet Union. In a 1956 radio interview he said that his reason for writing it had changed over time, and he also described the book as being about the danger of book burning in the United States.

The novel is short and written in a spare, imagistic style. It is a standalone work, and Bradbury later wrote essays and a stage adaptation of the same story.