Writing and development
Fahrenheit 451 developed out of a series of ideas Bradbury had visited in previously written stories. For many years, he tended to single out “The Pedestrian” in interviews and lectures as sort of a proto-Fahrenheit 451.
In the preface of his 2006 anthology Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451 he states that this is an oversimplification. The full genealogy of Fahrenheit 451 given in Match to Flame is involved. The following covers the most salient aspects.
Between 1947 and 1948, Bradbury wrote the short story “Bright Phoenix” (not published until the May 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) about a librarian who confronts a book-burning “Chief Censor” named Jonathan Barnes.
In late 1949, Bradbury was stopped and questioned by a police officer while walking late one night. When asked “What are you doing?”, Bradbury wisecracked, “Putting one foot in front of another.” This incident inspired Bradbury to write the 1951 short story “The Pedestrian”.
In “The Pedestrian”, Leonard Mead is harassed and detained by the city’s only remotely operated police cruiser for taking nighttime walks, something that has become extremely rare in this future-based setting, as everybody else stays inside and watches television (“viewing screens”).
Alone and without an alibi, Mead is taken to the “Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies” for his peculiar habit. Fahrenheit 451 echoed this theme of an authoritarian society distracted by broadcast media.
Bradbury expanded the book-burning premise of “Bright Phoenix” and the totalitarian future of “The Pedestrian” into “The Fireman”, a novella published in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. “The Fireman” was written in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library on a typewriter that he rented for a fee of ten cents per half hour. The first draft was 25,000 words long and was completed in nine days.
Urged by a publisher at Ballantine Books to double the length of his story to make a novel, Bradbury returned to the same typing room and made the story 25,000 words longer, again taking nine days. The title “Fahrenheit 451” came to him on January 22. The final manuscript was ready in mid-August, 1953. The resulting novel, which some considered as a fix-up (despite being an expanded rewrite of one single novella), was published by Ballantine in 1953.
Supplementary material
Bradbury has supplemented the novel with various front and back matter, including a 1979 coda, a 1982 afterword, a 1993 foreword, and several introductions.
Publication history
The first U.S. printing was a paperback version from October 1953 by The Ballantine Publishing Group. Shortly after the paperback, a hardback version was released that included a special edition of 200 signed and numbered copies bound in asbestos.
These were technically collections because the novel was published with two short stories, “The Playground” and “And the Rock Cried Out”, which have been omitted from later printings. A few months later, the novel was serialized in the March, April, and May 1954 issues of nascent Playboy magazine.
Expurgation
Starting in January 1967, Fahrenheit 451 was subject to expurgation by its publisher, Ballantine Books, with the release of the “Bal-Hi Edition” aimed at high school students.
Among the changes made by the publisher were the censorship of the words “hell”, “damn”, and “abortion”; the modification of seventy-five passages; and the changing of two incidents.
In the first incident, a drunk man is changed to a “sick man”, while the second involves cleaning fluff out of a human navel, which instead becomes “cleaning ears” in the other.
For a while, both the censored and uncensored versions were available concurrently, but by 1973, Ballantine was publishing only the censored version. That continued until 1979, when it came to Bradbury’s attention:
In 1979, one of Bradbury’s friends showed him an expurgated copy of the book. Bradbury demanded that Ballantine Books withdraw that version and replace it with the original, and in 1980 the original version once again became available.
In this reinstated work, in the Author’s Afterword, Bradbury relates to the reader that it is not uncommon for a publisher to expurgate an author’s work, but he asserts that he himself will not tolerate the practice of manuscript “mutilation”.
The “Bal-Hi” editions are now referred to by the publisher as the “Revised Bal-Hi” editions.
Non-print publications
An audiobook version read by Bradbury himself was released in 1976 and received a Spoken Word Grammy nomination. Another audiobook was released in 2005 narrated by Christopher Hurt. The e-book version was released in December 2011.
Reception
In 1954, Galaxy Science Fiction reviewer Groff Conklin placed the novel “among the great works of the imagination written in English in the last decade or more.” The Chicago Sunday Tribune’s August Derleth described the book as “a savage and shockingly prophetic view of one possible future way of life”, calling it “compelling” and praising Bradbury for his “brilliant imagination”.
Over half a century later, Sam Weller wrote, “upon its publication, Fahrenheit 451 was hailed as a visionary work of social commentary.” Today, Fahrenheit 451 is still viewed as an important cautionary tale about conformity and the evils of government censorship.
When the novel was first published, there were those who did not find merit in the tale. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas were less enthusiastic, faulting the book for being “simply padded, occasionally with startlingly ingenious gimmickry, … often with coruscating cascades of verbal brilliance but too often merely with words.”
Reviewing the book for Astounding Science Fiction, P. Schuyler Miller characterized the title piece as “one of Bradbury’s bitter, almost hysterical diatribes,” while praising its “emotional drive and compelling, nagging detail.” Similarly, The New York Times was unimpressed with the novel and further accused Bradbury of developing a “virulent hatred for many aspects of present-day culture, namely, such monstrosities as radio, TV, most movies, amateur and professional sports, automobiles, and other similar aberrations which he feels debase the bright simplicity of the thinking man’s existence.”
Fahrenheit 451 was number seven on the list of “Top Check Outs OF ALL TIME” by the New York Public Library
Censorship/banning incidents
In the years since its publication, Fahrenheit 451 has occasionally been banned, censored, or redacted in some schools at the behest of parents or teaching staff either unaware of or indifferent to the inherent irony in such censorship. Notable incidents include:
In Apartheid South Africa, the book was burned along with thousands of banned publications between the 1950s and 1970s.
In 1987, Fahrenheit 451 was given “third tier” status by the Bay County School Board in Panama City, Florida, under superintendent Leonard Hall’s new three-tier classification system.
Third tier was meant for books to be removed from the classroom for “a lot of vulgarity”. After a resident class-action lawsuit, a media stir, and student protests, the school board abandoned their tier-based censorship system and approved all the currently used books.
In 1992, Venado Middle School in Irvine, California, gave copies of Fahrenheit 451 to students with all “obscene” words blacked out. Parents contacted the local media and succeeded in reinstalling the uncensored copies.
In 2006, parents of a 10th-grade high school student in Montgomery County, Texas, demanded the book be banned from their daughter’s English class reading list.
Their daughter was assigned the book during Banned Books Week, but stopped reading several pages in due to what she considered the offensive language and description of the burning of the Bible. In addition, the parents protested the violence, portrayal of Christians, and depictions of firemen in the novel.
Themes
Discussions about Fahrenheit 451 often center on its story foremost as a warning against state-based censorship. Indeed, when Bradbury wrote the novel during the McCarthy era, he was concerned about censorship in the United States. During a radio interview in 1956, Bradbury said
I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things have changed a lot in four years.
Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.
As time went by, Bradbury tended to dismiss censorship as a chief motivating factor for writing the story. Instead he usually claimed that the real messages of Fahrenheit 451 were about the dangers of an illiterate society infatuated with mass media and the threat of minority and special interest groups to books. In the late 1950s, Bradbury recounted
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering.
From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a
