Fahrenheit 451 is set in an unspecified city (likely in the American Midwest) in the year 1999

(according to Ray Bradbury’s Coda), though it is written as if set in a distant future.[note 1] The
earliest editions make clear that it takes place no earlier than the year 1960.[note 2][16][17]

The novel is divided into three parts: "The Hearth and the Salamander," "The Sieve and the
Sand," and "Burning Bright."

"The Hearth and the Salamander"

Guy Montag is a "fireman" employed to burn the possessions of those who read outlawed books.
He is married but has no children. One fall night while returning from work, he meets his new
neighbor, a teenage girl named Clarisse McClellan, whose free-thinking ideals and liberating
spirit cause him to question his life and his own perceived happiness. Montag returns home to
find that his wife Mildred has overdosed on sleeping pills, and he calls for medical attention.
Two uncaring EMTs pump Mildred's stomach, drain her poisoned blood, and fill her with new
blood. After the EMTs leave to rescue another overdose victim, Montag goes outside and
overhears Clarisse and her family talking about the way life is in this hedonistic, illiterate
society. Montag's mind is bombarded with Clarisse's subversive thoughts and the memory of his
wife's near-death. Over the next few days, Clarisse faithfully meets Montag each night as he
walks home. She tells him about how her simple pleasures and interests make her an outcast
among her peers and how she is forced to go to therapy for her behavior and thoughts. Montag
looks forward to these meetings, and just as he begins to expect them, Clarisse goes missing. He
senses something is wrong.[18]

In the following days, while at work with the other firemen ransacking the book-filled house of
an old woman before the inevitable burning, Montag steals a book before any of his coworkers
notice. The woman refuses to leave her house and her books, choosing instead to light a match
and burn herself alive. Jarred by the woman's suicide, Montag returns home and hides the stolen
book under his pillow. Later, Montag wakes Mildred from her sleep and asks her if she has seen
or heard anything about Clarisse McClellan. She reveals that Clarisse's family moved away after
Clarisse was hit by a speeding car and died four days ago. Dismayed by her failure to mention
this earlier, Montag uneasily tries to fall asleep. Outside he suspects the presence of "The
Mechanical Hound", an eight-legged[19] robotic dog-like creature that resides in the firehouse and
aids the firemen in hunting book hoarders.

Montag awakens ill the next morning. Mildred tries to care for her husband but finds herself
more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the
walls. Montag suggests that maybe he should take a break from being a fireman after what
happened last night, and Mildred panics over the thought of losing the house and her parlor wall
"family". Captain Beatty, Montag's fire chief, personally visits Montag to see how he is doing.
Sensing his concerns, Beatty recounts the history of how books lost their value and how the
firemen were adapted for their current role: over the course of several decades, people began to
embrace new media (in this case, film and television), sports, and an ever-quickening pace of
life. Books were ruthlessly abridged or degraded to accommodate short attention spans while
minority groups protested the controversial, outdated content they perceived in literature (yet
comic books, trade papers, and sex magazines remained, as these fed into the mainstream
population's desire for mindless entertainment). At the same time, advances in technology
resulted in nearly all buildings being made out of fireproof materials, and the traditional role of
firemen in preventing fires was no longer necessary. The government instead turned the firemen
into officers of society's peace of mind: instead of putting out fires they became responsible for
starting them, specifically for the purpose of burning books, which were condemned as sources
of confusing and depressing thoughts that only complicated people's lives. After an awkward
encounter between Millie and Montag over the book hidden under Montag's pillow, Beatty
becomes suspicious and casually adds a passing threat as he leaves, telling Montag that if a
fireman had a book, he would be asked to burn it within the next 24 hours. If he refused, the
other firemen would come and burn his house down for him. The encounter leaves Montag
shaken.

After Beatty leaves, Montag reveals to Mildred that, over the last year, he has accumulated a
stash of books that he has kept hidden in the air-conditioning duct in their ceiling. In a panic,
Mildred grabs a book and rushes to throw it in the kitchen incinerator. Montag subdues her and
tells her that the two of them are going to read the books to see if they have value. If they do not,
he promises the books will be burned and all will return to normal.

"The Sieve and the Sand"

Montag and Mildred discuss the stolen books, and Mildred refuses to go along with it,
questioning why she or anyone else should care about books. Montag goes on a rant about
Mildred's suicide attempt, Clarisse's disappearance and death, the old woman who burned
herself, and the imminent threat of war that goes ignored by the masses. He suggests that perhaps
the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction. The
conversation is interrupted by a call from Mildred's friend, Mrs. Bowles, and they set up a date to
watch the "parlor walls" that night at Mildred's house.

Montag concedes that Mildred is a lost cause and he will need help to understand the books. He
remembers an old man named Faber, an English professor before books were banned, whom he
once met in a park. Montag makes a subway trip to Faber's home along with a rare copy of the
Bible, the book he stole at the woman's house. Once there, Montag forces the scared and
reluctant Faber into helping him by methodically ripping pages from the Bible. Faber concedes
and gives Montag a homemade ear-piece communicator so he can offer constant guidance.

At home, Mildred's friends, Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps, arrive to watch the "parlor walls". Not
interested in this insipid entertainment, Montag turns off the walls and tries to engage the women
in meaningful conversation, only for them to reveal just how indifferent, ignorant, and callous
they truly are. Enraged by their idiocy, Montag leaves momentarily and returns with a book of
poetry. This confuses the women and alarms Faber, who is listening remotely. Mildred tries to
dismiss Montag's actions as a tradition firemen act out once a year: they find an old book and
read it as a way to make fun of how silly the past is. Montag proceeds to recite the poem Dover
Beach, causing Mrs. Phelps to cry. At the behest of Faber in the ear-piece, Montag burns the
book. Mildred's friends leave in disgust, while Mildred takes more sleeping pills.
Montag hides his books in the backyard before returning to the firehouse late at night with just
the stolen Bible. He finds Beatty playing cards with the other firemen. Montag hands Beatty a
book to cover for the one he believes Beatty knows he stole the night before, which is
unceremoniously tossed into the trash. Beatty tells Montag that he had a dream in which they
fought endlessly by quoting books to each other. Thus Beatty reveals that, despite his
disillusionment, he was once an enthusiastic reader. A fire alarm sounds, and Beatty picks up the
address from the dispatcher system. They drive recklessly in the fire truck to the destination:
Montag's house.

"Burning Bright"

Beatty orders Montag to destroy his own house, telling him that his wife and her friends reported
him after what happened the other night. Montag watches as Mildred walks out of the house, too
traumatized about losing her parlor wall family to even acknowledge her husband's existence or
the situation going on around her, and catches a taxi. Montag obeys the chief, destroying the
home piece by piece with a flamethrower, but Beatty discovers Montag's ear-piece and plans to
hunt down Faber. Montag threatens Beatty with the flamethrower and, after Beatty taunts him,
burns his boss alive and knocks his coworkers unconscious. As Montag escapes the scene, the
Mechanical Hound attacks him, managing to inject his leg with a tranquilizer. He destroys the
Hound with the flamethrower and limps away. Before he escapes, however, he realizes that
Beatty had wanted to die a long time ago and had purposely goaded Montag as well as provided
him with a weapon.

Montag runs through the city streets towards Faber's house. Faber urges him to make his way to
the countryside and contact the exiled book-lovers who live there. He mentions he will be
leaving on an early bus heading to St. Louis and that he and Montag can rendezvous there later.
On Faber's television, they watch news reports of another Mechanical Hound being released,
with news helicopters following it to create a public spectacle. After wiping his scent from
around the house in hopes of thwarting the Hound, Montag leaves Faber's house. He escapes the
manhunt by wading into a river and floating downstream. Montag leaves the river in the
countryside, where he meets the exiled drifters, led by a man named Granger. Granger shows
Montag the ongoing manhunt on a portable battery TV and predicts that “Montag” will be caught
within the next few minutes; as predicted, an innocent man is then caught and killed.

The drifters are all former intellectuals. They have each memorized books should the day arrive
that society comes to an end and is forced to rebuild itself anew, with the survivors learning to
embrace the literature of the past. Granger asks Montag what he has to contribute to the group
and Montag finds that he had partially memorized the Book of Ecclesiastes. While learning the
philosophy of the exiles, Montag and the group watch helplessly as bombers fly overhead and
annihilate the city with nuclear weapons: the imminent war has begun and ended in the same
night. While Faber would have left on the early bus, everyone else (including Mildred) is
immediately killed. Montag and the group are injured and dirtied, but manage to survive the
shockwave.

The following morning, Granger teaches Montag and the others about the legendary phoenix and
its endless cycle of long life, death in flames, and rebirth. He adds that the phoenix must have
some relationship to mankind, which constantly repeats its mistakes, but explains that man has
something the phoenix does not: mankind can remember its mistakes and try never to repeat
them. Granger then muses that a large factory of mirrors should be built so that people can take a
long look at themselves and reflect on their lives. When the meal is over, the exiles return to the
city to rebuild society.

Characters
 Guy Montag is the protagonist and a fireman who presents the dystopian world in which
he lives first through the eyes of a worker loyal to it, then as a man in conflict about it,
and eventually as someone resolved to be free of it. Through most of the book, Montag
lacks knowledge and believes only what he hears.
 Clarisse McClellan is a young girl one month short of her 17th birthday who is Montag's
neighbor. She walks with Montag on his trips home from work.[note 3][20] One critic
described her as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl,[21] as Clarisse is an unusual sort of person
compared to the others inhabiting the bookless, hedonistic society: outgoing, naturally
cheerful, unorthodox, and intuitive. She is unpopular among peers and disliked by
teachers for asking "why" instead of "how" and focusing on nature rather than on
technology. A few days after her first meeting with Montag, she disappears without any
explanation; Mildred tells Montag (and Captain Beatty confirms) that Clarisse was hit by
a speeding car and that her family moved away following her death. In the afterword of a
later edition, Bradbury notes that the film adaptation changed the ending so that Clarisse
(who, in the film, is now a 20-year-old schoolteacher who was fired for being
unorthodox) was living with the exiles. Bradbury, far from being displeased by this, was
so happy with the new ending that he wrote it into his later stage edition.
 Mildred "Millie" Montag is Guy Montag's wife. She is addicted to sleeping pills,
absorbed in the shallow dramas played on her "parlor walls" (flat-panel televisions), and
indifferent to the oppressive society around her. She is described in the book as "thin as a
praying mantis from dieting, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, and her flesh
like white bacon." Despite her husband's attempts to break her from the spell society has
on her, Mildred continues to be shallow and indifferent. After Montag scares her friends
away by reading Dover Beach, and finding herself unable to live with someone who has
been hoarding books, Mildred betrays Montag by reporting him to the firemen and
abandoning him, and dies when the city is bombed.
 Captain Beatty is Montag's boss and the book's main antagonist. Once an avid reader, he
has come to hate books due to their unpleasant content and contradicting facts and
opinions. After attempting to force Montag to burn his house, Montag kills him with a
flamethrower, only to later realize that Beatty had given him the flamethrower and
goaded him on purpose so that Montag would kill him. However, it is still unclear
whether or not Beatty was ever on Montag's side, or if he was just suicidal. In a scene
written years later by Bradbury for the Fahrenheit 451 play, Beatty invites Montag to his
house where he shows him walls of books left to molder on their shelves.
 Stoneman and Black are Montag's coworkers at the firehouse. They do not have a large
impact on the story and function only to show the reader the contrast between the firemen
who obediently do as they are told and someone like Montag, who formerly took pride in
 his job but subsequently realizes how damaging it is to society. Black is later framed by
Montag for possessing books.
 Faber is a former English professor. He has spent years regretting that he did not defend
books when he saw the moves to ban them. Montag turns to him for guidance,
remembering him from a chance meeting in a park sometime earlier. Faber at first refuses
to help Montag, and later realizes Montag is only trying to learn about books, not destroy
them. He secretly communicates with Montag through an electronic ear-piece and helps
Montag escape the city, then gets on a bus to St. Louis and escapes the city himself
before it is bombed. Bradbury notes in his afterword that Faber is part of the name of a
German manufacturer of pencils, Faber-Castell.
 Mrs. Ann Bowles and Mrs. Clara Phelps are Mildred's friends and representative of the
anti-intellectual, hedonistic mainstream society presented in the novel. During a social
visit to Montag's house, they brag about ignoring the bad things in their lives and have a
cavalier attitude towards the upcoming war, their husbands, their children, and politics.
Mrs. Phelps' husband Pete was called in to fight in the upcoming war (and believes that
he'll be back in a week because of how quick the war will be) and thinks having children
serves no purpose other than to ruin lives. Mrs. Bowles is a thrice-married single mother.
Her first husband divorced her, her second died in a jet accident, and her third committed
suicide by shooting himself in the head. She has two children who do not like or respect
her due to her permissive, often negligent and abusive parenting; Mrs. Bowles brags that
her kids beat her up, and she's glad she can hit back. When Montag reads Dover Beach to
them, he strikes a chord in Mrs. Phelps, who starts crying over how hollow her life is.
Mrs. Bowles chastises Montag for reading "silly awful hurting words".
 Granger is the leader of a group of wandering intellectual exiles who memorize books in
order to preserve their contents.

Title
The title page of the book explains the title as follows: Fahrenheit 451—The temperature at
which book paper catches fire and burns.... On inquiring about the temperature at which paper
would catch fire, Bradbury had been told that 451 °F (233 °C) was the autoignition temperature
of paper.[22][23] In various studies, scientists have placed the autoignition temperature at a range
of temperatures between 424 and 475 °F (218 and 246 °C), depending on the type of paper.[24][25]

Historical context
Bradbury's lifelong passion for books began at an early age. After graduating from high school,
Bradbury's family could not afford for him to attend college so Bradbury began spending time at
the Los Angeles Public Library where he essentially educated himself.[26] As a frequent visitor to
his local libraries in the 1920s and 1930s, he recalls being disappointed because they did not
stock popular science fiction novels, like those of H. G. Wells, because, at the time, they were
not deemed literary enough. Between this and learning about the destruction of the Library of
Alexandria,[27] a great impression was made on the young man about the vulnerability of books
to censure and destruction. Later, as a teenager, Bradbury was horrified by the Nazi book
burnings[28] and later by Joseph Stalin's campaign of political repression, the "Great Purge", in
which writers and poets, among many others, were arrested and often executed.[29]

Shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of World War II,
the United States focused its concern on the Soviet atomic bomb project and the expansion of
communism. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), formed in 1938 to
investigate American citizens and organizations suspected of having communist ties, held
hearings in 1947 to investigate alleged communist influence in Hollywood movie-making. These
hearings resulted in the blacklisting of the so-called "Hollywood Ten",[30] a group of influential
screenwriters and directors. This governmental interference in the affairs of artists and creative
types greatly angered Bradbury.[31] Bradbury was bitter and concerned about the workings of his
government, and a late 1949 nighttime encounter with an overzealous police officer would
inspire Bradbury to write "The Pedestrian", a short story which would go on to become "The
Fireman" and then Fahrenheit 451. The rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy's hearings hostile to
accused communists, beginning in 1950, deepened Bradbury's contempt for government
overreach.[32][33]

The year HUAC began investigating Hollywood is often considered the beginning of the Cold
War, as in March 1947, the Truman Doctrine was announced. By about 1950, the Cold War was
in full swing, and the American public's fear of nuclear warfare and communist influence was at
a feverish level. The stage was set for Bradbury to write the dramatic nuclear holocaust ending of
Fahrenheit 451, exemplifying the type of scenario feared by many Americans of the time.[34]

Bradbury's early life witnessed the Golden Age of Radio, while the transition to the Golden Age
of Television began right around the time he started to work on the stories that would eventually
lead to Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury saw these forms of media as a threat to the reading of books,
indeed as a threat to society, as he believed they could act as a distraction from important affairs.
This contempt for mass media and technology would express itself through Mildred and her
friends and is an important theme in the book.[35]

Writing and development

Between 1947 and 1948,[38] Bradbury wrote the short story "Bright Phoenix" (not published until
the May 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction[39][40]) about a librarian who
confronts a book-burning "Chief Censor" named Jonathan Barnes.

In late 1949,[41] Bradbury was stopped and questioned by a police officer while walking late one
night.[42][43] When asked "What are you doing?", Bradbury wisecracked, "Putting one foot in
front of another."[42][43] This incident inspired Bradbury to write the 1951 short story "The
Pedestrian".[note 4][42][43]

In The Pedestrian, Leonard Mead is harassed and detained by the city's remotely operated police
cruiser (there's only one) for taking nighttime walks, something that has become extremely rare
in this future-based setting: everybody else stays inside and watches television ("viewing
screens"). Alone and without an alibi, Mead is taken to the "Psychiatric Center for Research on
Regressive Tendencies" for his peculiar habit. Fahrenheit 451 would later echo this theme of an
authoritarian society distracted by broadcast media.[44]

Bradbury expanded the book-burning premise of "Bright Phoenix"[45] and the totalitarian future
of "The Pedestrian"[46] into "The Fireman", a novella published in the February 1951 issue of
Galaxy Science Fiction.[47][48] "The Fireman" was written in the basement of UCLA's Powell
Library on a typewriter that he rented for a fee of ten cents per half hour.[49] The first draft was
25,000 words long and was completed in nine days.[50]

Urged by a publisher at Ballantine Books to double the length of his story to make a novel,
Bradbury returned to the same typing room and expanded his work into Fahrenheit 451, again
taking just nine days.[49] The fixup[51] was published by Ballantine in 1953.[52]

Supplementary material

Bradbury has supplemented the novel with various front and back matter, including a 1979
coda,[53] a 1982 afterword,[54] a 1993 foreword, and several introductions.

Publication history
The first U.S. printing was a paperback version from October 1953 by The Ballantine Publishing
Group. Shortly after the paperback, a hardback version was released that included a special
edition of 200 signed and numbered copies bound in asbestos.[55][56][57] These were technically
collections because the novel was published with two short stories: The Playground and And the
Rock Cried Out, which have been absent in later printings.[1][58] A few months later, the novel
was serialized in the March, April, and May 1954 issues of nascent Playboy magazine.[8][59]

Expurgation

Starting in January 1967, Fahrenheit 451 was subject to expurgation by its publisher, Ballantine
Books with the release of the "Bal-Hi Edition" aimed at high school students.[60][61] Among the
changes made by the publisher were the censorship of the words "hell", "damn", and "abortion";
the modification of seventy-five passages; and the changing of two episodes.[61][62]

In the one case, a drunk man became a "sick man" while cleaning fluff out of a human navel
became "cleaning ears" in the other.[61][63] For a while both the censored and uncensored versions
were available concurrently but by 1973 Ballantine was publishing only the censored
version.[63][64] This continued until 1979 when it came to Bradbury's attention:[63][64]
In 1979, one of Bradbury's friends showed him an expurgated copy. Bradbury demanded that
Ballantine Books withdraw that version and replace it with the original, and in 1980 the original
version once again became available. In this reinstated work, in the Author's Afterword,
Bradbury relates to the reader that it is not uncommon for a publisher to expurgate an author's
work, but he asserts that he himself will not tolerate the practice of manuscript "mutilation".

The "Bal-Hi" editions are now referred to by the publisher as the "Revised Bal-Hi" editions.[65]

Non-print publications

An audiobook version read by Bradbury himself was released in 1976 and received a Spoken
Word Grammy nomination.[13] Another audiobook was released in 2005 narrated by Christopher
Hurt.[66] The e-book version was released in December 2011.[67][68]

Reception
In 1954, Galaxy Science Fiction reviewer Groff Conklin placed the novel "among the great
works of the imagination written in English in the last decade or more."[69] The Chicago Sunday
Tribune's August Derleth described the book as "a savage and shockingly prophetic view of one
possible future way of life", calling it "compelling" and praising Bradbury for his "brilliant
imagination".[70] Over half a century later, Sam Weller wrote, "upon its publication, Fahrenheit
451 was hailed as a visionary work of social commentary."[71] Today, Fahrenheit 451 is still
viewed as an important cautionary tale about conformity and the evils of government
censorship.[72]

When the novel was first published, there were those who did not find merit in the tale. Anthony
Boucher and J. Francis McComas were less enthusiastic, faulting the book for being "simply
padded, occasionally with startlingly ingenious gimmickry, ... often with coruscating cascades of
verbal brilliance [but] too often merely with words."[73] Reviewing the book for Astounding
Science Fiction, P. Schuyler Miller characterized the title piece as "one of Bradbury's bitter,
almost hysterical diatribes," while praising its "emotional drive and compelling, nagging
detail."[74] Similarly, The New York Times was unimpressed with the novel and further accused
Bradbury of developing a "virulent hatred for many aspects of present-day culture, namely, such
monstrosities as radio, TV, most movies, amateur and professional sports, automobiles, and other
similar aberrations which he feels debase the bright simplicity of the thinking man's
existence."[75]

Censorship/banning incidents

In the years since its publication, Fahrenheit 451 has occasionally been banned, censored, or
redacted in some schools by parents and teaching staff either unaware of or indifferent to the
inherent irony in such censorship. The following are some notable incidents:

 In 1987, Fahrenheit 451 was given "third tier" status by the Bay County School Board in
Panama City, Florida under then-superintendent Leonard Hall's new three-tier
classification system.[76] Third tier was meant for books to be removed from the
 classroom for "a lot of vulgarity".[76] After a resident class-action lawsuit, a media stir,
and student protests, the school board abandoned their tier-based censorship system and
approved all the currently used books.[76]
 In 1992, Venado Middle School in Irvine, California gave copies of Fahrenheit 451 to
students with all "obscene" words blacked out.[77] Parents contacted the local media and
succeeded in reinstalling the uncensored copies.[77]
 In 2006, parents of a 10th-grade high school student in Montgomery County, Texas
demanded the book be banned from their daughter's English class reading list.[78] Their
daughter was assigned the book during Banned Books Week, but stopped reading several
pages in due to the offensive language and description of the burning of the Bible. In
addition, the parents protested the violence, portrayal of Christians, and depictions of
firemen in the novel.[78]

Themes
Discussions about Fahrenheit 451 often center on its story foremost as a warning against state-
based censorship. Indeed, when Bradbury wrote the novel during the McCarthy era, he was
concerned about censorship in the United States. During a radio interview in 1956,[79][80]
Bradbury said:

I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country
four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book
burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things
have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the
time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a
country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the
dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort
of action.

As time went by, Bradbury tended to dismiss censorship as a chief motivating factor for writing
the story. Instead he usually claimed that the real messages of Fahrenheit 451 were about the
dangers of an illiterate society infatuated with mass media and the threat of minority and special
interest groups to books. In the late 1950s, Bradbury recounted:

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve
in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife
passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in
one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny
copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to
man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up
and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not
fiction.[81]

This story echoes Mildred's "Seashell ear-thimbles" (i.e., a brand of in-ear headphones) that act
as an emotional barrier between her and Montag. In a 2007 interview, Bradbury maintained that
people misinterpret his book and that Fahrenheit 451 is really a statement on how mass media
like television marginalizes the reading of literature.[7] Regarding minorities, he wrote in his
1979 Coda:

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit
matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist,
Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels
it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. [...] Fire-Captain Beatty, in
my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping
a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty
and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever. [...] Only six weeks ago, I discovered that,
over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young,
had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections from the novel. Students, reading
the novel, which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me
of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire
book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.[82]

Book-burning censorship, Bradbury would argue, was a side-effect of these two primary factors;
this is consistent with Captain Beatty's speech to Montag about the history of the firemen.
According to Bradbury, it is the people, not the state, who are the culprit in Fahrenheit 451.[7]
Nevertheless, the role of censorship, state-based or otherwise, is still perhaps the most frequent
theme explored in the work.[83][better source needed][84]

A variety of other themes in the novel besides censorship have been suggested. Two major
themes are resistance to conformity and control of individuals via technology and mass media.
Bradbury explores how the government is able to use mass media to influence society and
suppress individualism through book burning. The characters Beatty and Faber point out that the
American population is to blame. Due to their constant desire for a simplistic, positive image,
books must be suppressed. Beatty blames the minority groups, who would take offense to
published works that displayed them in an unfavorable light. Faber went further to state that the
American population simply stopped reading on their own. He notes that the book burnings
themselves became a form of entertainment for the general public.