Ray Bradbury’s
FAHRENHEIT 451
What? Where?
When? Who?
Why?
WHAT?
 Reading
banned
 Firefighters burn books
 Censorship
 Conformity
 Imagination repressed
 Technology advanced
WHERE?
 In
a violent and hedonistic
future America
 In the city
*hedonistic means selfindulgent
WHEN?
 In
the not-so-distant future?
 Written over 50 years ago
 Based on “The Fireman”
which was published in 1950
WHO?
 Guy
Montag
 His wife, Mildred
 Clarisse McClellan, a teen
 Captain Beatty
 Professor Faber
WHY?
 Hatred
of thought
investigation/thought control
 Mary Bradbury, tried in 17th
century Salem Witch Trials
 McCarthyism
 Black Listing
 Book Banning
FACT – FACT – FACT – FACT
1953 Ballantine Books publish
F451
 1967 Special Edition for schools
Modified 75 passages to eliminate
words like “hell,” “damn,” and
“abortion”

1980 Bradbury’s friend informs him
Ballantine withdrew version
AGREE?
“Censorship
reflects a
society’s lack of
confidence in itself.”
Potter Stewart/Associate
Justice of the Supreme
Court (1915-1985)
FACT – FACT – FACT – FACT
 LATE
1950’S American
television - cookie-cutter
sitcoms, predictable
westerns, and violent
dramas.
Critics howled, but
viewership continued to rise
AGREE?

Television is
“…a really dreadful influence on
all of us. Don’t ever look at local
television news again. It’s all
crap. There’s no news, there’s
no information. It’s negative,
negative, negative. You look at
that, and you think the world is
coming to an end.” Bradbury 1990
AGREE?
 Television
is very dangerous.
Because it repeats and
repeats and repeats our
disasters instead of our
triumphs.”
Bradbury 1990
Three Sections
 “The
Hearth and the
Salamander”
 “The Sieve and the Sand”
 “Burning Bright”
Symbols
 The
title refers to the
temperature at which books
burn.
 Salamander – mythological
lizard capable of living in fire
 Phoenix – mythological bird
reborn from fire
Themes
 conformity
vs. individuality
 Freedom of speech and the
consequences of using it
 importance of reading and
understanding history
 Machines – help us or hinder
us
Critical Issues


Censorship – the suppression of a
book, movie, etc. considered
offensive or a threat to security
A story about how television
destroys interest in reading
literature.
Why might censorship
be imposed?
 to
protect the public
 to protect our children’s
growth and development
 religious beliefs
 to be fair to minorities