The literary world has lost another giant with the passing of Ray Bradbury today at age 91. Bradbury evoked the terror of totalitarianism in Fahrenheit 451. With a title taken from the temperature at which paper burns, the novel tells the story of a fireman, Montag. But in this world firemen don't put out fires, they start them. Written in 1953, the images of Nazi book burning and Stalinist repression were fresh in his mind.
Cold War angst played a large part in Bradbury's work. In The Martian Chronicles human colonists on Mars witness Earth's nuclear apocalypse in the Martian sky. His other classics include Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, The Halloween Tree and many others.
In some ways, Bradbury became a repository for American angst. He was descended from a witch tried at Salem, Massachusetts. His father lost his job during the depression, prompting a move to California. As a child, he had vivid nightmares that often became fodder for his stories. A child of the depression, he developed a relentless work ethic writing 1,000 words a day from the age of 14 until his health would no longer permit it. He wrote “Fahrenheit 451” at the UCLA library, on typewriters that rented for 10 cents a half hour. He said he carried a sack full of dimes to the library and completed the book in nine days, at a cost of $9.80.
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