Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury (1953)
“A fireman who burns books. A society that chose its own ignorance. Written by a man so broke he had to feed coins into a typewriter — in a library.”
Short Summary
In a future America where firemen start fires instead of stopping them, Guy Montag burns books for a living. A brief friendship with a seventeen-year-old neighbor named Clarisse McClellan cracks his contentment open. He begins stealing books, is betrayed by his wife Mildred, and watches his Captain Beatty — a man who has read everything and chosen destruction — burn in a flamethrower. Montag flees the city, joins a community of book-memorizers living in the wilderness, and watches the war jets bomb the city he left behind.
Detailed Summary
Guy Montag is a fireman in a future America where houses are fireproof and firemen burn books — the last repositories of unsimplified thought. He has been happy for ten years without ever questioning why. That contentment cracks the night he meets Clarisse McClellan, his seventeen-year-old neighbor,...