Fahrenheit 451

Product Description Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradburys internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television family. But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didnt live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. Review Brilliant . . . Startling and ingenious . . . Mr. Bradburys account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating. Orville Prescott, The New York TimesA masterpiece . . . A glorious American classic everyone should read: Its life-changing if you read it as a teen, and still stunning when you reread it as an adult. Alice Hoffman, The Boston GlobeThe sheer lift and power of a truly original imagination exhilarates . . . His is a very great and unusual talent. Christopher Isherwood, TomorrowOne of this countrys most beloved writers . . . A great storyteller, sometimes even a mythmaker, a true American classic. Michael Dirda, The Washington Post About the Author Ray Bradbury (19202012) was the author of more than three dozen books, including Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, as well as hundreds of short stories. He wrote for the theater, cinema, and TV, including the screenplay for John Hustons Moby Dick and the Emmy Awardwinning teleplay The Halloween Tree, and adapted for television sixty-five of his stories for The Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundations Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and numerous other honors. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. A New Introduction byRay BradburyMarch 12, 2003What is there new to be said about Fahrenheit 451? I have written three or four introductions in the past thirty years trying to explain where the novel came from and how it finally arrived.The first thing to be said is that I feel very fortunate to have survived long enough to join with people who have been paying attention to the novel in this past year.The novel was a surprise then and is still a surprise to me.I've always written at the top of my lungs and from some secret motives within. I have followed the advice of my good friend Federico Fellini who, when asked about his work, said, "Don't tell me what I'm doing, I don't want to know."The grand thing is to plunge ahead and see what your passion can reveal.During the last fifty years I have written a short 25,000-word early version of the novel titledThe Fireman, which appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, and several years later added another 25,000 words for its publication by Ballantine Books.Occupying a house with a new baby daughter, we had to consider my trying to find somewhere that was a bit quieter to do my work. I had no money at that time to rent an office, but wandering around U.C.L.A. one day I heard typing in the basement of the library and went down to see what was going on. I found that there was a room with twelve typewriters that could be rented for ten cents per half hour. Excited at the prospect, I brought a bag of dimes with me and moved into the typing room.I didn't know what the various students were writing at their typewriters and they hardly knew, nor did I know, what I was writing.If there is an

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• Fahrenheit 451;9781451673319;1451673310