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This chapter analyzes Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and its dystopian contexts. The novel widely is recognized as a classic among postwar American dystopias. It belongs in that body of science fiction published just after the Second World War, which gradually took over the function of social criticism previously performed by realist fiction. The novel shares an overall pattern common to two of the most famous dystopias of the period: Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952). All three novels focus on a protagonist working within an organization with which he becomes increasingly dissatisfied. Under the impact of a catalytic character or event, these dissatisfactions gradually come to a head and result in final separation from that organization.

This chapter examines the changes, revisions, delays, compromises, and other issues, not to mention Ray Bradbury's own concerns, that Fahrenheit 451 had to go through before it could be finally released. As early as January 18, 1953, Bradbury already had a working title—Fahrenheit 270—for a book that would allude to the temperature at which book paper burns. He began to work with Joe Mugnaini on cover illustrations. For his part, Don Congdon was able to convince Doubleday not to interfere with Ballantine's Fahrenheit collection while also handling media negotiations for a Bradbury Showcase concept that was still at play with CBS Television. This chapter provides the background for Fahrenheit 451 and looks at some of the people who worked behind the scenes, including Mugnaini, Congdon, and Stanley Kauffmann.

This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953). This novel imagines a society where minority pressure groups and mass communications technology have evolved into a concordance between masses and the State. Culturally and historically depthless, the fragile texture of a society governed by technology and simulacra is regulated not by an authoritarian State, but by the public themselves — what Baudrillard calls the simulation pact. With that in mind, this chapter argues that Fahrenheit 451's vision of the future has traversed the dystopian model, particularly that of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, to become an inversive utopia, and that its forms of subjectivity can be explained through Deleuze and Guattari's account of fascism.

This chapter reflects on Ray Bradbury's career, describing him as a writer who never really fit the genres he was assigned to. It begins with a discussion of Fahrenheit 451, a novel that illustrates how the ideas in Bradbury's science fiction, often dark and occasionally hopeful, had become cautionary. For Bradbury, the future danger was not technology, but the humans who will control it. The nuclear war that closes both “The Fireman” and Fahrenheit 451 ran parallel to a number of mid-century Bradbury stories, such as “The Last Night of the World” and the last four tales in The Martian Chronicles. This chapter also considers Bradbury's strengths and shortcomings as a creative writer, one who could not resist the temptation of playing the storyteller with details of his own life, but also absolutely true to his public convictions; his desire to be true to his Muse, to write for himself with little regard for outside pressures, has been a constant hallmark of his writing career.

Chapter 35 begins with the Red Planet success of Pathfinder and the Mars rover Sojourner, and continues with Bradbury’s hosting of NASA’s 1998 Thomas O. Paine Memorial Award ceremony under the title “Witness & Celebrate: An Evening on Mars with Ray Bradbury.” Distinguished film actors, including Nichelle Nichols, John Rhys-Davies, and Charlton Heston, read from ten Bradbury works. The chapter also discusses “The Affluence of Despair,” Bradbury’s Jeremiad against America’s obsession with self-performance and extreme media reporting, which he likened to the world he had tried to prevent in Fahrenheit 451. The chapter closes with an analysis of Bradbury’s love for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and what this love reveals about his ability to fend off the worst effects of fame.

In 1994 Bradbury placed six stories, more than he had in a number of years, but his fiction continued to miss the major market magazines. Chapter 33 documents the film projects of the mid-1990s—a Fahrenheit 451 screenplay for Mel Gibson, and a script for The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit under consideration with Disney. A collaboration with NASA artist Robert McCall, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and special effects master Douglas Trumbull centered on an IMAX Corporation film theater project titled The City in the Stars, but Bradbury’s storyboard narrative was never produced. The chapter also describes Ray and Maggie Bradbury’s 1994 and 1995 summer sojourns in Paris with American expatriate journalists, and Bradbury’s increasing loss of hearing from mastoiditis.

This chapter examines how Ray Bradbury's disillusionment with modernity led him to take on Modernist themes such as isolation, alienation, the loss of values, and the decline of traditional sources of wisdom. Bradbury's early work on the Illinois novel coincided with the development of two novel concepts that would not reach print in any form for sixty years: Masks and Where Ignorant Armies Clash By Night. Behind the scenes of his award-winning success with major market magazines, Bradbury's own search for a writing identity in long fiction moved for a time beyond the psychological novel he was writing about his Illinois youth. This chapter considers Bradbury's development of Masks as a second psychological novel project beginning in April 1946 and the ways it differed from the psychological underpinnings of the Illinois novel. It also discusses how Where Ignorant Armies Clash By Night led to Fahrenheit 451 and how one set of its page fragments evolved into a published story as “The Smile” (1952).

The summer of 1990 found Bradbury slowly revisiting his screenplay for a new Fahrenheit 451 adaptation, and the successful run of a new musical production of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit created by the popular composer and singer Jose Feliciano. Chapter 28 continues with Bradbury’s collection of essays on various creative topics collected as Yestermorrow, where he explored the nature of metaphor and the value of child-like reverie to his creative process. The chapter describes Bradbury’s role as a judge in the controversial Turner Tomorrow Award in June 1991, where he took issue with the views of fellow judges William Styron and Peter Matthiessen and earned the gratitude of prize founder Ted Turner. A final visit with Federico Fellini in Rome concludes the chapter.

Of the 180 witnesses called to testify before the 2004 Presidential Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond, Bradbury would be the only writer. Chapter 39 documents his abiding contention that a struggle against the universe would replace warfare with a new movement away from Earthbound politics. He continued to avoid a pragmatic discussion, but the Commission chair noted that Bradbury’s words had reminded everyone that they were planning for the future of their own children. The chapter continues with his selection for a 2004 National Medal of Arts bestowed by President George W. Bush, the selection of Fahrenheit 451 for the nation’s Big Read program, and the final development of Bradbury’s unfinished Mexican novel as the screenplay for The Next in Line.

This chapter examines the lessons learned by Ray Bradbury from his readings during the war years. There were Modernists who appealed to Bradbury in more mature ways than Frederic Prokosch had done, and there were in fact abiding lessons that he could take away from some of these other writers such as Somerset Maugham and Christopher Morley. Maugham and Morley provided Bradbury the narrative models that were reinforced by Thornton Wilder's The Cabala (1926). This chapter considers two other novels read by Bradbury and what he learned from each one of them: the English translation of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1941) and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1944). It shows that Darkness at Noon's ethical insights inspired Bradbury to embark on a work of fiction that would evolve, over a period of six years, into Fahrenheit 451.