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Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
What's your favorite banned book?
I think mine is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I kind of like the irony of a book about censorship being censored itself. I didn't read this book until I was perhaps in my 40s or 50s (which was s...
-kim.kovacs
Dystopian Fiction
I'm sure you have read it but I really enjoyed reading Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. And also liked Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451 - although, it now feels all too real.
-Gabi_J
"Brilliant ... Startling and ingenious ... Mr. Bradbury's account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating." —The New York Times
"One of this country's most beloved writers ... A great storyteller, sometimes even a mythmaker, a true American classic." —The Washington Post
"A masterpiece ... A glorious American classic everyone should read: It's life-changing if you read it as a teen, and still stunning when you reread it as an adult." —The Boston Globe
This information about Fahrenheit 451 was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was the author of more than three dozen books, including Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, as well as hundreds of short stories. He wrote for the theater, cinema, and TV, including the screenplay for John Huston's Moby Dick and the Emmy Award–winning teleplay The Halloween Tree, and adapted for television sixty-five of his stories for The Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and numerous other honors.
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