Ray Bradbury ; and "Fahrenheit 451"

Comment :
I saw the film "Fahrenheit 451"  in my early 20's.  The story which written by Roy Bradbury ....  was a topic very close to my heart because i had been reading 1984 by G.Orwell and "A Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley .... it was a story about "The Power" controlling humanity by sedating its mind ....  today we have other means of doing this ....

For the author's 1975 story collection, see Ray Bradbury (collection).

Ray Bradbury
Bradbury in 1975
Born	Ray Douglas Bradbury August 22, 1920 Waukegan, Illinois, U.S.
Died	June 5, 2012 (aged 91) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Resting place	Westwood Memorial Park, Westwood, Los Angeles
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American
Education	Los Angeles High School
Period	1938–2012[1]
Genre	Fantasy, social commentary, science fiction, horror fiction, mystery fiction, magic realism
Notable works	Fahrenheit 451 The Martian Chronicles Something Wicked This Way Comes Dandelion Wine
Notable awards	American Academy of Arts and Letters (1954); Daytime Emmy Award (1994); National Medal of Arts (2004); Pulitzer Prize (2007)
Spouse	Marguerite McClure (m. 1947; her death 2003)
Children	4
Signature
Website
www.raybradbury.com

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. He worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery fiction.
Widely known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and his science-fiction and horror-story collections, The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and I Sing the Body Electric (1969), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers. While most of his best known work is in speculative fiction, he also wrote in other genres, such as the coming-of-age novel Dandelion Wine (1957) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992).
Recipient of numerous awards, including a 2007 Pulitzer Citation, Bradbury also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted to comic book, television, and film formats.
Upon his death in 2012, The New York Times called Bradbury "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".^[2]

Fahrenheit 451

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This article is about the novel. For other uses, see Fahrenheit 451 (disambiguation).

Fahrenheit 451

First edition cover (clothbound)
Author	Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury, published in 1953. It is regarded as one of his best works.^[4] The novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found.^[5] The book's tagline explains the title: "Fahrenheit 451 – the temperature at which book paper catches fire, and burns..." The lead character is a fireman named Montag who becomes disillusioned with the role of censoring works and destroying knowledge, eventually quitting his job and joining a resistance group who memorize and share the world's greatest literary and cultural works.
The novel has been the subject of interpretations focusing on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. In a 1956 radio interview,^[6] Bradbury said that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns at the time (during the McCarthy era) about the threat of book burning in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature.^[7]
In 1954, Fahrenheit 451 won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal.^[8][9][10] It has since won the Prometheus "Hall of Fame" Award in 1984^[11] and a 1954 "Retro" Hugo Award, one of only six Best Novel Retro Hugos ever given, in 2004.^[12] Bradbury was honored with a Spoken Word Grammy nomination for his 1976 audiobook version.^[13]
Adaptations include François Truffaut's 1966 film adaptation of the novel and a 1982 BBC Radio dramatization.^[14] Bradbury published a stage play version in 1979^[15] and helped develop a 1984 interactive fiction computer game titled Fahrenheit 451, and a collection of his short stories, A Pleasure to Burn. HBO released a television film based on the novel in 2018.

Take Me Home

By Ray Bradbury

Illustration by Jacob Escobedo

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents’ boarding house, in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing Amazing Stories, with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination. Soon after, the creative beast in me grew when Buck Rogers appeared, in 1928, and I think I went a trifle mad that autumn. It’s the only way to describe the intensity with which I devoured the stories. You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion.
When I look back now, I realize what a trial I must have been to my friends and relatives. It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another. I was always yelling and running somewhere, because I was afraid life was going to be over that very afternoon.
My next madness happened in 1931, when Harold Foster’s first series of Sunday color panels based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan” appeared, and I simultaneously discovered, next door at my uncle Bion’s house, the “John Carter of Mars” books. I know that “The Martian Chronicles” would never have happened if Burroughs hadn’t had an impact on my life at that time.
I memorized all of “John Carter” and “Tarzan,” and sat on my grandparents’ front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, “Take me home!” I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.
While I remained earthbound, I would time-travel, listening to the grownups, who on warm nights gathered outside on the lawns and porches to talk and reminisce. At the end of the Fourth of July, after the uncles had their cigars and philosophical discussions, and the aunts, nephews, and cousins had their ice-cream cones or lemonade, and we’d exhausted all the fireworks, it was the special time, the sad time, the time of beauty. It was the time of the fire balloons.
Even at that age, I was beginning to perceive the endings of things, like this lovely paper light. I had already lost my grandfather, who went away for good when I was five. I remember him so well: the two of us on the lawn in front of the porch, with twenty relatives for an audience, and the paper balloon held between us for a final moment, filled with warm exhalations, ready to go.
I’d helped my grandpa carry the box in which lay, like a gossamer spirit, the paper-tissue ghost of a fire balloon waiting to be breathed into, filled, and set adrift toward the midnight sky. My grandfather was the high priest and I his altar boy. I helped take the red-white-and-blue tissue out of the box and watched as Grandpa lit a little cup of dry straw that hung beneath it. Once the fire got going, the balloon whispered itself fat with the hot air rising inside.
But I could not let it go. It was so beautiful, with the light and shadows dancing inside. Only when Grandpa gave me a look, and a gentle nod of his head, did I at last let the balloon drift free, up past the porch, illuminating the faces of my family. It floated up above the apple trees, over the beginning-to-sleep town, and across the night among the stars.

We stood watching it for at least ten minutes, until we could no longer see it. By then, tears were streaming down my face, and Grandpa, not looking at me, would at last clear his throat and shuffle his feet. The relatives would begin to go into the house or around the lawn to their houses, leaving me to brush the tears away with fingers sulfured by the firecrackers. Late that night, I dreamed the fire balloon came back and drifted by my window.
Twenty-five years later, I wrote “The Fire Balloons,” a story in which a number of priests fly off to Mars looking for creatures of good will. It is my tribute to those summers when my grandfather was alive. One of the priests was like my grandpa, whom I put on Mars to see the lovely balloons again, but this time they were Martians, all fired and bright, adrift above a dead sea. ♦