Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is
a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak,
dystopian future. Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where
television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction,
firemen start fires rather than put them out. 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 then he meets an eccentric young
neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people
didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world
through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of
television. When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly
disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever
known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his
pilfering is discovered, th