Fahrenheit 451

1.

Fahrenheit 451
(1953) by Ray Douglas Bradbury
Made by Zakhvataeva Maria, 032101

2.

Ray Douglas Bradbury
was an American author and screenwriter.
One of the most celebrated 20th-century
American writers, he worked in a variety of
genres, including fantasy, science
fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic
fiction.
The New York Times called Bradbury "An
author whose fanciful imagination,
poetic prose, and mature
understanding of human character
have won him an international
reputation" and "the writer most
responsible for bringing modern science
fiction into the literary mainstream".

3.

Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel by American
writer Ray Bradbury. It presents a future American society
where books have been outlawed and "firemen" burn any
that are found. The novel follows in the viewpoint of Guy
Montag, a fireman who soon becomes disillusioned with
his role of censoring literature and destroying
knowledge, eventually quitting his job and
committing himself to the preservation of literary and
cultural writings.
One of the most famous mistakes in the title is
"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury. The author intended
the title to reflect the autoignition temperature of paper,
and the author consulted a fireman. Apparently, the
fireman got the temperature scale wrong, because the
autoignition temperature of paper is 451 degrees
Celsius, not Fahrenheit.

4.

Background
The negative experience of book burning has
already occurred in human history. Books were
burned in masse in Nazi Germany as part of
ideological censorship, and their authors were
subjected to repression.
In the United States, under Senator Joseph
McCarthy, the policy of McCarthyism arose,
within the framework of which pro-communist
literature was burned, although President Dwight
David Eisenhower called for books not to be
burned, but to be placed in libraries so that they
could be read.

5.

Censorship
Fahrenheit 451 has been a victim of censorship since
its inception. In 1967, Ballantine Books began publishing
a special edition for high schools. Over seventy-five
sentences were changed to remove Bradbury's usual curse
words "damn," "hell," and references to abortion, and two
passages were rewritten, but the changes were not
marked, and most readers were unaware of them, since
few had read the original version.
In the USSR it was first published in 1956 in
Russian, translated by T. N. Shinkar. Soviet readers
could read reviews of this work already in the second
half of 1954. And the reviews of the book were different:
from almost negative to very positive. Negative reviews,
which appeared in the ideological journals of the
Central Committee of the CPSU, such as "Kommunist",
did not lead to the banning of the novel in the territory of
the Soviet Union.

6.

Thank you for attention!