The novel was inspired in part by the burning of books in Nazi Germany, which burned books by authors who contradicted National Socialist ideology.
Ray Bradbury wrote this novel in the basement of the Los Angeles Public Library on a rental typewriter that had a coin slot, and for 10 cents it turned on for half an hour. The novel was written in nine days, and the rental of the typewriter cost $ 9.80. The text is based on the unpublished story "Fireman" (1949), as well as the story "Pedestrian".
The novel was first published in parts in the first issues of Playboy magazine.
"Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories." - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
"Fahrenheit 451" is a dystopian science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury, published in 1953. The novel describes an American society in the near future, in which books are banned; "firefighters", including the main character Guy Montag, burn any books they find. In the course of the novel, Montag becomes disenchanted with the ideals of the society of which he is a part, becomes an outcast and joins a small underground group of outcasts, whose supporters memorize the texts of books in order to save them for posterity. The title of the book is explained in the epigraph: "Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper ignites and burns." The book contains many quotes from the works of English-speaking authors of the past (such as William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift and others), as well as several quotes from the Bible.
The images and themes of the novel, including the theme of book burning, were subjected to various interpretations, including as a metaphor for state censorship and oppression of free thought in a totalitarian society. The novel was written during the McCarthy years in the United States, and Bradbury spoke of it in the 1950s as a reaction to the events of the time. In later interviews, however, Bradbury spoke about the threat to reading and book culture from the intoxicating media, primarily television.
In 1954, the book was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Prize and the Gold Medal of the California Commonwealth Club. In 1984, she was inducted into the "Prometheus Hall of Fame", and in 2004 she was awarded the Hugo Prize, issued “retrospectively”. The novel was filmed several times (the 1966 film and the 2018 film), and the BBC Radio 1 radio show (1982) was released. Bradbury himself adapted "Fahrenheit 451" into a script for theatrical production and recorded an audio version of the book - in 1977 it was nominated for a Grammy. He also took part in the creation of the text-based computer game Fahrenheit 451. (1984), serving as a kind of continuation of the novel.
"Fahrenheit 451" has been a victim of censorship since its inception. In 1967, Ballantine Books began publishing a special edition of the book for high schools. Over seventy-five phrases were changed to exclude the usual Bradbury curses "damn", "hell" and the mention of abortion, two fragments were rewritten, but there were no notes about the corrections made, and most readers did not even know about them, since few people read the original version.
In 1980, a friend of the writer drew his attention to abbreviations, and the author of the book demanded that the publisher stop publishing abridged versions, replacing them with a full one. The publisher agreed, and in 1980 the full version of the book began to be published.
The censorship story caught the attention of the American Library Association, which found that school clubs cut books in one way or another. Appealing to its authority and threatening to remove ABA's Best Books from all abridged editions, the organization succeeded in getting the abbreviated books in the school book club to be labeled on the imprint pages as a school book club publication.
In 2012, Google proposed to standardize a new HTTP status code, HTTP 451, which will alert Internet users that a page they are requesting exists but is not available to them for legal reasons. The code was approved by the Internet Engineering Regulations Group in 2015 and added to the HTTP standard in 2016; thanks to Ray Bradbury in the text of the notice of the introduction of the new code.
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