Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 18, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial Post. Fahrenheit 451 remains Ray Bradbury’s most famous and bestselling book. Four years before it was published in 1953, Bradbury, who never got a driver’s license, was walking the streets of Los Angeles late at night as he liked to do, and he was stopped by a policeman and asked what he was doing. “Putting one foot in front the other,” he said. He wrote a dark prophecy of a short story, “The Pedestrian,” out of the incident, and it was the beginning of the dystopian world of Fahrenheit 451. He famously wrote the novel on a rented typewriter in the basement of the Los Angeles Public Library, all three parts, after Ballantine Books asked him to extend the first novella. It has one of the most famous opening lines of the 20th Century: “It was a pleasure to burn.” Bradbury’s fears about the future of books, thereby the future of imagination, were set specifically in the context of the McCarthy Red Scare paranoia and persecution. To react to the stress of the present by extrapolating trends to “1999,” as Bradbury did, is the essential trait of science fiction. From immediate relevance to timelessness is the test of art, and Bradbury passed that test. Not surprisingly and with unintentional irony, the novel has often been censored and banned and objected to by his own publisher in the first case and by schools in the latter cases. People get upset with the image of burning books (shades of the Nazi book bonfires), and when they get upset they sometimes don’t know how or where to respond. It is Bradbury’s genius that he knew this and imagined a powerful story to dramatize it. If books ever do disappear, it will be the last one to go.