Fahrenheit 451, By Ray Douglas Bradbury

American author Ray Douglas Bradbury is known for his science fiction, horror, and mystery fiction novels. His works vary in length, from long fiction to short fiction, and he has also written many children’s novels, poetry, dramatic short stories, and screenplays. Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22, 1920. Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, his father, was related to Mary Bradbury, one of the women who were tried for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of Salem, Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. His father worked as a lineman at the Waukegan Bureau of Power and Light. His mother was Esther Marie née Moberg Bradbury emigrated from Sweden to the United States. At the age of three years old, Bradbury and his

He worked on projects like “A Journey through United States History” during a fair in New York. The Walt Disney Corporation enjoyed his work and hired him to create themes and ideas for Spaceship Earth, part of the Epcot Center at Disney World Orlando. Continuing with this creative outlook of the twenty first century, Bradbury participated in a project to design a twenty-first century city near Tokyo (Paradowski). Entering into the 1980’s, Bradbury focused on turning his famous novel, Fahrenheit 451, into an opera and also his novel Dandelion Wine into a

Bradbury took many years to develop Fahrenheit 451. What began as a short story called “Bright Phoenix” which described a small town that tried to end the government book burning in the town by memorizing all of the banned books was further developed and was expanded into a longer story, “The Fireman.” After “The Fireman” appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, a fire chief told Bradbury that book paper ignites on fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Bradbury again further developed “The Fireman,” and soon it became known as Fahrenheit 451, one of his most prominent works. Fahrenheit 451 was a novel based in a future totalitarian state, possibly attacking McCarthyism which was at the height of its power when the book was published (Heller). Bradbury truly was a bibliophile who used his novel, Fahrenheit 451, to show society the necessity of the books in a society to continue the culture and attitudes for human creativity and for the generations to come (Paradowski). George recounted Bradbury’s opinion of his novel when George reported, “‘I'm not a science fiction writer,’ he was frequently quoted as saying. ‘I've written only one book of science fiction [Fahrenheit 451]. All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.’”