“It was a passionate and exciting time for me,” Bradbury wrote. “So, exhilarated, I got a bag of dimes and settled into the room, and in nine days, I spent $9.80 and wrote my story in other words, it was a dime novel,” Bradbury had said.īradbury found Powell enchanting he ran up and down the stairs, grabbing books and pulling quotes to put into Fahrenheit 451. In the basement of Powell Library, he found rows of typewriters, which could be rented for 20 cents an hour.

His house was noisy because of his newborn child, so he looked elsewhere. The author wanted to get started, but he needed more than an idea - he needed a place to write. “Since I’m a library person, having educated myself in the libraries of Los Angeles, all of this concerned me, and the older I got, the more I wanted to write stories about libraries and books,” Bradbury wrote in UCLA Magazine in 2002. The idea of burning books was one that Bradbury was tinkering with for a while after hearing about how Stalin and Hitler burned books. The firefighter eventually becomes disenchanted with his involvement in destroying knowledge and joins a resistance effort to preserve the books. Now comes a new HBO adaptation.īut many who love the story might not know that its beginnings are linked to the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library.įahrenheit’s story centers on a firefighter in a dystopian world, where books are burned to prevent knowledge.

There was a British film version in 1966, a play in 1979 and a video game in 1984. Fahrenheit 451 fits squarely into this dystopian literary tradition.Author Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 tells such a powerful story that it never ceases to inspire adaptations. Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Kurt Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron,' and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, are among the most-read dystopian novels and short stories of the past century. Rather than create ideal societies meant to serve as models for improvement, authors instead created dystopias, or nightmare societies, designed to sound a warning about modern society's problems. In the 20th century, fictionalized societies frequently took on a darker, oppressive aspect. Edward Bellamy, writing at the end of the 19th century, imagined an ideal future society in Looking Backward: 2000–1887. Plato's Republic is one of the earliest and best-known utopias, while Sir Thomas More's sixteenth century work Utopia gives the genre its name. Some authors have created utopias, or ideal states, with the intention to show how civilization might be improved. Many authors have created states and societies in their works of fiction and philosophy.

451° Farenheito by Ray Bradbury