Fahrenheit 451

1
Fahrenheit 451

• A novel by Ray Bradbury
• Background Information

2

• Fahrenheit 451 is set in the future, but it is a
  future that Bradbury envisioned in the early
  1950s.
• In order to understand the novel more thoroughly,
  it is helpful to understand the climate of the
  world in which Bradbury was writing.

3
Echoes of War

• World War II had ended only a few years earlier.
  The war began in Europe in 1939, and ended in
  1945, when the United States dropped the first
  atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
  and Nagasaki.

4

• How is communism different from capitalism?
• As the Cold War between communism and the West
  reached its height, the threat of nuclear warfare
  loomed large in peoples minds. Must popular
  culture of the time, including science fiction
  books and movies, reflected this fear.

5
Books Under Fire

• In Germany before WWII, thousands of books deemed
  unacceptable to Hilters Nazi regime were burned.
  Images of such mass book-burnings were still a
  fairly recent memory when Bradbury wrote his
  novel.
• How would these memories impact people?

6

• In dictatorships that survived the war, such as
  the Soviet Union and fascist Spain, many books
  were still banned and writers and other
  intellectuals persecuted.
• How would this make artists, writers, and other
  creative people feel?

7

• Eastern Europe saw similar repression as the Nazi
  occupation was replaced by Russian-dominated
  communism in the years just after the war. In
  1949, China fell to communism also.

8
The American Dream

• By the mid-1950s, nearly 60 of Americans were
  members of the middle class. They had the money
  to buy increasing numbers of products and
  consumerism came to be equated by many with
  success.
• Do you think this is still true in American
  society today?

9

• The electronics industry, which has benefited
  greatly from wartime research, became the fifth
  largest industry in the U.S. in the 1950s.
  Television, in particular, began to have a
  widespread impact on American homes, and many
  people feared the consequences.
• What negative consequences could come from
  television?

10

• During the 1950s, the United States truly became
  an automobile culture. The process was helped
  greatly in 1956 by the Interstate Highway Act,
  which authorized the building of a nationwide
  highway network. The number of cars on the road
  jumped from 40 million at the start of the decade
  to 60 million in 1960.
• What impact might this have had?