Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury's dystopia is clearly humming with the anxieties of its times. But how well do we know the decade that made them? Fahrenheit 451 still resonates. Books censorship has never gone away, after all. But, as many people in the Reading Group have pointed out, it's also a book that clearly reflects its time. Ray Bradbury says that one of the main inspirations for Fahrenheit 451 came when he was out walking with a writer friend, and "a police car pulled up and the policeman got out and asked us 'What are you doing?'" Bradbury explained that they were out walking ("putting one foot in front of the other" was his first "smartaleck" response.) The policeman didn't like it. "Don't do it again!" he told Bradbury – which sent the writer into such a rage that he went home and wrote the short story [The Pedestrian [PDF]]( , imagining a time in which everyone who walked was considered a criminal. Later, he took his "midnight criminal stroller" for another walk around the future city – and Fahrenheit 451 was born. It's also impossible to talk about the 1950s without discussion of the Bomb. The book was written less than a decade after Nagasaki and Hiroshima (think about 9/11 to see how raw they must have seemed) and during an ever-escalating arms race. The future, in many ways, looked desperate. Concomitant to the Bomb was, of course, the cold war – and clearly that, too, influenced the book. The Soviets were sending writers to gulags and banning questionable books, while in the US McCarthy was persecuting writers and the HUAC was in full swing. And then, of course, the memory of the Nazis still burned all too bright .