Critical Essays Dystopian Fiction and Fahrenheit 451

Historical Influences for Fahrenheit 451

Despite all the rich possibilities of exploration in Fahrenheit 451, the issue of book burning, or censorship, remains most central to the novel and is the most difficult issue with which to grapple. In essence, book burning is synonymous with irrationality in the twentieth century. The genesis of Fahrenheit 451 was presumably contagious with the period of Nazi anti-intellectualism during the late 1930s, and book burning certainly became a synonym for anti-intellectualism in science fiction of the 1950s — as it was in Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (Lippincott, 1959). Fahrenheit 451 emerged during a period of extreme interest in what Brian W. Aldiss calls "an authoritarian society" that roughly corresponds to the years 1945-1953, as revealed in George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1948); B.F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948); Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952); Evelyn Waugh's Love Among the Ruins (1953); and Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1953). Moreover, the postwar period also produced several novels and films concerned with the possibilities of nuclear holocaust, which hovers over Montag's world throughout the novel.

The novel also appears during the era known as the McCarthy period, the postwar political climate characterized by xenophobia, blacklisting, and censorship. In June 1949, for example, Representative John S. Wood asked some seventy colleges to submit their textbooks for examination and approval by the Un-American Activities Committee. Bradbury himself (Nation, May 2, 1953), in an article on science fiction as social criticism, suggested that "when the wind is right, a faint odor of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy." Many of the issues explored in the novel cannot be separated from the historical period in which they appeared. This assertion is not to say, however, that they are no longer relevant or timely issues. Indeed, the novel evidently held a particular fascination for readers in the 1980s when censorship in schools and libraries resurged. Although the novel initially went through six printings in its first twelve years (1953-1965), it went through twenty printings in the next five years (1966-1971) and has been in print since its initial publication.

As stated earlier, Fahrenheit 451 is Bradbury's best-known novel, which, incidentally, happens to be science fiction. The novel need not, nor should it be, read only by science fiction or fantasy enthusiasts. Fahrenheit 451 is, among other things, a genuine cultural document of the early 1950s as well as a book of great imagination — regardless of its genre.