Examples Of Ray Bradbury's Editing Process For Fahrenheit 451

Marcus Olah: How did you first learn of Ray Bradbury’s books?

Jonathan Eller: I had started, like most folks did, as an adolescent reading his work. When I was 10 years old I read The Golden Apples of the Sun, a story collection which was full of magical fantasy stories. And then, eventually, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man (which contained most of his best science fiction work), and then worked my way through Dandelion Wine, a sort of novelized story collection about growing up in the Midwest in the 1920s and 30’s. And of course, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

M.O.: How did you come to meet and, eventually, know Bradbury?

J.E.: I went to the Air Force Academy for college in 1969, was commissioned in ’73. I never thought I’d meet

J.E.: Oh, sure! Fahrenheit 451, when he first published it in 1951, was a little novella called The Fireman of maybe 25,000 words. The world and American politics was a very tense place in those years and during the Climate of Fear. Lots of non-conformist kinds of literature were under scrutiny. Anything that wasn’t mainstream or ‘the norm’ was sort of under the scrutinizing eye of the McCarthy era. Ray thought that The Fireman could stand to be enlarged to a 50,000 word novel and published under a title that stood for the temperature at which book paper combusts. He found out by calling a firehouse.

Firehouses are storehouses of knowledge because fire captains are also arson investigators. They know things like that, where the chemistry departments at places like U of C and UCLA, near where he lived in Los Angeles, couldn’t give him a number like that specifically because it’s not a normal research subject. He found out that book paper ignites at the temperature of 451 degrees Fahrenheit. He then transposed the title and the rest is

and literature is often a springboard for commentary on the way things are going and a way to try and make things better in a country. That kind of writing was sort of under suspicion at that time. Fahrenheit was a very timely book.

M.O.: Do you know if he was aware how controversial this story would be?

J.E.: Yeah, he kind of was because he had written stories that were sort of warm-up stories to Fahrenheit for three or four years before he finished the work and he knew that there would probably be some push-back. At a time like that when people are very worried about international politics, any kind of non-authoritarian or anti-authoritarian book would be controversial. He expected it, but he already had a good, broad reputation as one of America’s best known writers. He really wasn’t afraid to publish a book like Fahrenheit, but he knew that it would probably cause some controversy.

M.O.: There was intent behind