FAHRENHEIT 451:
INTRODUCTION &
JOURNAL ASSIGNMENTS
Ms. Milton
AP Language and Composition
Background on Ray Bradbury
• In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury has inspired
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generations of readers to dream, think, and create.
A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well
as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays,
Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles,
The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way
Comes.
He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby
Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his
stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his
teleplay of The Halloween Tree.
In 2005, Bradbury published a book of essays titled Bradbury Speaks, in
which he wrote: “In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and
found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so
happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and
for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not
optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.”
Ray Bradbury (cont’d)
• Throughout his life,
Bradbury liked to recount
the story of meeting a
carnival magician, Mr.
Electrico, in 1932. At the
end of his performance
Electrico reached out to
the twelve-year-old
Bradbury, touched the boy
with his sword, and
commanded, Live forever!
Bradbury later said, I
decided that was the
greatest idea I had ever
heard. I started writing
every day. I never stopped.
Ray Bradbury (cont’d)
• Ray Bradbury, recipient
of the 2000 National
Book Foundation Medal
for Distinguished
Contribution to American
Letters, the 2004
National Medal of Arts,
and the 2007 Pulitzer
Prize Special Citation,
died on June 5, 2012, at
the age of 91 after a
long illness. He lived in
Los Angeles.
Introduction to Fahrenheit 451
• Imagine a world where everything is sped up, where
billboards are five times bigger than ours because the
speed limit is so high, where everything you see from a
car is a blur, where pedestrians don’t exist. A future
populated by non-readers and non-thinkers, people with
no sense of their history, where a totalitarian government
has banned the written word. This is more than just a
story of dictatorial censorship, it is a story that also draws
parallels between entertainment and addiction, between
individual avoidance of thinking and governmental means
of thought prevention.
What type of novel is Fahrenheit 451?
Utopian Literature
Dystopian Literature
• Literature that describes
• Literature that describes
an imaginary ideal
an imaginary world that
world.
is highly unpleasant.
• Coined by Thomas More
• Pun on the Greek eutopia
“good place” and outopia
“no place”
• Greek term for “bad
place”
• Fahrenheit 451 is a
dystopian novel.
Backdrop of novel’s composition
• Fahrenheit 451 is a social criticism that warns against the
danger of suppressing thought through censorship. It
uses the convention of science fiction to convey the
message that oppressive government, left unchecked,
does irreparable damage to society by curtailing the
creativity and freedom of its people. The dystopia motif,
popular in science fiction—that of a technocratic and
totalitarian society that demands order at the expense of
individual rights—is central to the novel.
• Developed in the years immediately following World War
II, Fahrenheit 451 condemns not only the antiintellectualism of Nazi Germany, but more immediately
America in the early 1950’s—the heyday of McCarthyism.
• Fahrenheit 451 is set in the future, but the events
of the 1950’s greatly influenced the story’s plot.
• WWII recently ended
• Atomic bombs-Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• Cold War-fear of communism and nuclear
warfare reflected in many aspects of Western
culture.
• By the 1950s 60% of Americans were considered
“middle class”=consumerism
• Electronics industry became 5th largest post-war.
Television was both popular and controversial.
• 1956 Interstate Highway Act lead to the American
automobile culture. In 10 years the number of cars on
the road increased by 20 million.
• In the futuristic world of Fahrenheit 451,
everything is fireproofed.
• In the 1950s the use of asbestos, a mixture of
minerals used to make noncombustible
materials, became extremely popular.
• The first 200 copies of Fahrenheit 451 were bound
in a fireproof material.
• Censoring-when words or parts of books are “cleaned up” or
completely deleted from the original novel
• Censorship-to change to public’s access to material based the
decisions of a governing authority or its representatives. This can
range from restriction to complete removal of the text from an
institution
• Challenged-an attempt to remove or restrict materials based on the
objections of a person or group.
• Restriction-when a book is kept from a certain audience based on the
objections of a person or group.
• Banned –when a book completely removed from an institution because
of the objections of a person or group.
• In the 13th c. during the Mongol
invasion of Baghdad, entire libraries
were burnt, and books were thrown into
the Tigris River
• WWII Germany, thousands of books
that were unapproved by the Nazi party
were burned.
• Communist Russia and China, which
rose after the war, have also banned
books.
• Dictatorships that survived the war,
such as the Soviet Union and Spain,
also banned and burned books. The
authors of these works were also
persecuted.
Premise of Fahrenheit 451
Setting
Major Characters
• 24th Century
• Guy Montag
• Firemen set fires, not put
• Mildred Montag
them out
• Books are considered
contraband
• Clarisse McClellan
• Old Woman
• Captain Beatty
• Professor Faber
Journal Assignment 1: Read pages 1-31
• Due date: October 21, 2015
• Assignment value: 45 points
• Rubric: Student will receive five points for answering each
component of each bullet assignment and five points for
providing detailed evidence for each component answer.
• On a sheet of paper, respond to the following items
providing quotes, quotations, paraphrases, and specific
page numbers—details—from the novel:
• Describe Guy Montag and his job.
• Describe Clarisse McClellan.
• Describe Mildred.
• Define parlor-walls.
Journal Assignment 2: Read pages 32-65
• Due date: November 2, 2015
• Assignment value: 70 points
• Rubric: Student will receive five points for answering each
component of each bullet assignment and five points for
providing detailed evidence for each component answer.
• On a sheet of paper, respond to the following items providing
quotes, quotations, paraphrases, and specific page numbers—
details—from the novel:
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Describe the way life used to be in this town.
Describe Captain Beatty.
Describe the mechanical hound.
Describe why the old woman lights a match.
Describe why the alarms were to always ring at night.
Describe the lie Captain Beatty tells Montag.
Describe what happens to Clarisse.
Journal Assignment 3: Read pages 67-85
• Due date: November 9, 2015
• Assignment value: 45 points
• Rubric: Student will receive five points for answering each
component of each bullet assignment and five points for
providing detailed evidence for each component answer.
• On a sheet of paper, respond to the following items
providing quotes, quotations, paraphrases, and specific
page numbers—details—from the novel:
• Describe Faber.
• Describe the three elements missing from Faber’s life.
• Describe the plan Montag and Faber devise.
Journal Assignment 4:
Read pages 87-130
• Due date: November 16, 2015
• Assignment value: 30 points
• Rubric: Student will receive five points for answering each
component of each bullet assignment and five points for
providing detailed evidence for each component answer.
• On a sheet of paper, respond to the following items
providing quotes, quotations, paraphrases, and specific
page numbers—details—from the novel:
• Describe the informant on Montag’s home.
• Describe what happens to Captain Beatty.
• Describe why Montag takes some of Faber’s dirty clothes with him.
Journal Assignment 5:
Read pages 131-158
• Due date: December 2, 2015
• Assignment value: 60 points
• Rubric: Student will receive five points for answering each
component of each bullet assignment and five points for
providing detail evidence for each component answer.
• On a sheet of paper, respond to the following items providing
quotes, quotations, paraphrases, and specific page numbers—
details—from the novel:
• Describe what the railroad tracks mean to Montag.
• Describe what was different about the fire Montag saw after leaving
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the river.
Describe why the camera identified an innocent man as Montag.
Describe what was different about the hobos Montag met.
Describe what happened to the city during the war.
Describe the mission Montag and the intellectuals took on once the
war ended.