60 Fun Facts About Fahrenheit 451

In the society of Fahrenheit 451, what do 'firemen' do?

Books have been outlawed, and the firemen destroy any that are found.

What is the first name of Montag, the novel's protagonist?

He starts loyal to the system, becomes disillusioned, and ends by helping to preserve the books he once burned.

According to the novel's title page, 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which what happens?

Studies actually put paper's autoignition point anywhere from 424 to 475 °F depending on the paper.

In what year was Fahrenheit 451 first published?

Bradbury finished the manuscript that year during the Second Red Scare; Ballantine issued it as a paperback in October.

Fahrenheit 451 grew out of which 1951 novella Bradbury published in Galaxy Science Fiction?

An editor at Ballantine, Stanley Kauffmann, urged him to double it into a full novel.

Bradbury's short story 'The Pedestrian', a seed of the novel, was inspired by his 1949 run-in with whom?

In the story a man is harassed and detained simply for taking a night-time walk while everyone else watches television.

Bradbury typed the first draft in nine days on rented typewriters in which university's library?

The typewriters rented for ten cents per half hour; the second nine-day burst doubled the story to novel length.

How long was the first draft that Bradbury completed in nine days?

When Ballantine asked him to double it, he went back to the same typing room and added another 25,000 words in another nine days.

Which era of American politics was Bradbury writing in, deepening his contempt for government overreach?

He also cited Nazi book burnings and Stalin's purges, in which 'they burned the authors instead of the books'.

Bradbury said he was fifteen when horrified by books being burned in the streets of Berlin by whom?

He was born in 1920, so that puts the burnings in the Nazis' first year in power.

What is the title of the novel's first part?

The salamander is the emblem of the firemen and the name of their fire engine.

What is the title of the novel's second part?

It opens with Mildred refusing to go along with Montag's plan to read the hidden books.

The third and final part of the novel is called what?

It begins with Beatty ordering Montag to burn down his own house.

Who is the free-spirited teenage neighbour whose questions make Montag doubt his life?

She is a month short of her 17th birthday and is sent to therapy for her odd habits, like enjoying nature and conversation.

How does Clarisse die, according to Mildred?

The book hints Beatty may have had her killed; the 1966 film keeps her alive with the exiles, an ending Bradbury liked so much he adopted it for his play.

Montag comes home one night to find his wife Mildred has done what?

Two technicians pump her stomach and move on to the next overdose; she remembers nothing in the morning.

What does Mildred call the characters on the giant wall-screens she watches all day?

When Montag suggests quitting, she panics at the thought of losing the house and the parlour walls.

What are Mildred's 'Seashell ear-thimbles'?

They wall her off from her husband; Bradbury said in 2007 that the book is really about how mass media marginalises reading.

How is Mildred physically described in the novel?

The description ends with 'her flesh like white bacon'.

What does an old woman do when the firemen arrive to destroy her hoard of books?

Montag steals a book from her house that night; it turns out to be a Bible.

Where has Montag been hiding the books he has stolen over the past year?

Mildred grabs one and runs for the kitchen incinerator; he stops her and insists they read them first.

What is the Mechanical Hound?

It lives in the firehouse and can inject its victims with an anaesthetic.

Who is Captain Beatty?

He explains that people abandoned books for film, television and speed long before the government made burning them official.

What does Beatty reveal about himself when Montag returns to the firehouse?

In the later stage play, Beatty even shows Montag walls of books left to moulder in his own house.

Faber, whom Montag turns to for help, used to be what before books were banned?

Bradbury noted that Faber is part of the name of a pencil maker, Faber-Castell, and of the publisher Faber and Faber.

How does Montag force the frightened Faber to help him?

Faber then gives him a homemade earpiece so he can whisper guidance from afar.

Which poem does Montag read aloud to Mildred's friends, reducing one of them to tears?

Matthew Arnold's poem strikes a chord in Mrs Phelps, and the visit ends with the women fleeing.

Where does the fire truck go when the alarm sounds near the end of Part Two?

Beatty tells him that his wife and her friends turned him in.

How does Montag kill Beatty?

Escaping, Montag concludes that Beatty wanted to die and had goaded him into it.

How does Montag finally shake off the second Mechanical Hound sent to hunt him?

News helicopters follow the hunt to make it a public spectacle; downstream he meets the book people.

Faber plans to escape the city on a bus to which US city?

He is the one character who is clearly out of the city when the bombs fall.

Who leads the group of exiled intellectuals Montag joins in the countryside?

Each of them has memorised a book to preserve it until society is ready to read again.

Which book of the Bible does Montag discover he has partly memorised?

The group has a technique for unlocking photographic memory.

How does the novel's war end?

The war begins and ends the same night; the exiles then walk back to rebuild.

A special hardback edition of 200 signed copies of the first edition was bound in what?

The 1953 hardback also included two short stories later dropped from printings.

The novel was serialised in the March, April and May 1954 issues of which new magazine?

The magazine had launched only in December 1953.

From 1967, Ballantine quietly sold an expurgated 'Bal-Hi' edition aimed at whom?

'Hell', 'damn' and 'abortion' were cut, 75 passages altered, a drunk became a 'sick man' and navel fluff became ear-cleaning.

How did Bradbury discover in 1979 that his novel about censorship had itself been censored?

He demanded the original be restored, which happened in 1980, and wrote an afterword refusing to tolerate 'mutilation'.

Bradbury's 1979 Coda warns 'There is more than one way to burn a book' and blames whom?

He listed Baptists and Unitarians, Irish and Italians, and many others 'running about with lit matches'.

In a 2007 interview, Bradbury insisted the novel is 'really' about what?

He said people misinterpreted the book, though in a 1956 interview he had tied it to fears of book burning in America.

Bradbury described himself as which of these?

He did not believe book burning was inevitable; he wanted to warn against it.

Which French New Wave director filmed Fahrenheit 451 in 1966?

It was his first colour film and his only one not in French; the opening credits are spoken, not printed.

In the 1966 film, Julie Christie plays which two roles?

Truffaut decided the two women should be two sides of the same coin; the wife was renamed Linda.

Who played Montag in Truffaut's film, clashing with the director throughout?

Stamp had been cast but dropped out, fearing being overshadowed by Christie's double role.

Which composer, recommended to Truffaut by Bradbury himself, scored the 1966 film?

Bradbury had met Herrmann on the set of Hitchcock's Torn Curtain.

Why are the 1966 film's opening credits spoken aloud rather than shown as text?

Truffaut was unhappy with the stilted English dialogue and preferred the French dub.

Who starred as Montag in the 2018 HBO film directed by Ramin Bahrani?

Michael Shannon played Beatty and Sofia Boutella played Clarisse; it premiered at Cannes to mixed reviews.

Bradbury sued CBS over a 1957 Playhouse 90 drama that blended his novel with which other book?

'A Sound of Different Drummers' was written by Robert Alan Aurthur; Bradbury eventually won on appeal.

The 1984 interactive-fiction video game of Fahrenheit 451 picks up where?

Bradbury wrote the prologue and the responses of the game's computer, 'Ray'.

What was the tagline of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, whose title annoyed Bradbury?

Bradbury wanted the film renamed; it became the highest-grossing documentary ever.

Which award did Fahrenheit 451 receive retroactively in 2004?

It had already won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1984 and the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal in 1954.

Bradbury's own 1976 audiobook reading of the novel earned him a nomination for what?

He also adapted the book as a stage play, first performed in Los Angeles in 1979.

Under apartheid, Fahrenheit 451 was itself burned in which country?

It went up in smoke along with thousands of other banned publications between the 1950s and 1970s.

Where do many immersive-sim video games hide a tribute to the novel?

The habit began with the System Shock series and has been copied ever since.

Bradbury's earlier story 'Bright Phoenix' (1947–48) pitted a librarian against whom?

Its premise and The Pedestrian's totalitarian future merged into The Fireman.

Unable to afford college, where did the young Bradbury educate himself, feeding his passion for books?

He was frustrated that libraries then refused to stock H. G. Wells as insufficiently literary, and learning of the Library of Alexandria's destruction left a deep mark.

How old is Clarisse McClellan when Montag meets her?

Teachers dislike her for asking 'why' instead of 'how', and one modern critic has called her an early Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

In the expurgated 'Bal-Hi' edition, a passage about picking fluff from a navel became what?

A 'drunk man' also became a 'sick man'; by 1973 Ballantine was selling only the censored text until Bradbury found out in 1979.

Which Indiana company gave Bradbury's own stage adaptation its official world premiere in November 1988?

In the play Clarisse returns in the finale as a 'book person' embodying Robert Louis Stevenson, while Montag becomes Edgar Allan Poe.

In which 1998 real-time strategy game does 'Gui Montag' appear as a terran firebat hero?

Sam Weller notes Bradbury predicted flat-panel TVs, earbud headphones and 24-hour banking machines; game designers repaid him with in-jokes.