Hi,

I'm a final year history student at Exeter University in the UK. I am researching for my final dissertation on Literary attitudes to totalitarianism in the 1940s / 1950s. I have read Fahrenhiet 451 and have a few questions concerning its origin. Was it written as a warning of a future form of totalitarianism, where propaganda and indoctrination was so advanced that the subjects willingly obeyed the state? This theme is obviously present in many of the other major totalitarian writings from this period. However, Farenhiet 451 is different in that the hero escapes from the system, / beats the system? Was this written as part of the western concern for totalitarianism following the war?

I want to determine how the concept of totalitarianism arose and why it was so heavily explored by western authors in this period.

I would greatly appreciate your views on these questions or any other help you can offer

-Thanks

-Max

Max,

welcome to the board. This strikes me as the kind of question that may get quite a few different answers from different people!

(By the way, I am a UK university lecturer, and I have been studying media adaptations of Bradbury for many years.)

If you are interested in BRADBURY's reasons for framing F451 the way he did, I would strongly recommend that you seek out a book called MATCH TO FLAME (publisher's web page here). It includes a detailed essay on the origin of Bradbury's text, and collects several of his works that are considered to be precursors of F451. You will find that he was fascinated by book-burning and the decline of literacy, as well as by totalitarian issues.

You might also look for Bradbury's afterword to F451, included in several of the more recent re-issues of the book, and also included in (i think) his book ZEN AND THE ART OF WRITING.

And in the last year there has been a lot of web babble about Bradbury's current opinion that F451 is actually about other stuff. However, beware, that his claims about what his books are about tend to change over time. What he says NOW about his reasons for writing F451 may be very different to what he was thinking in the 1950s.

Of course, there are broader issues than Bradbury's personal intentions. I wil leave it to others to discuss the sociopoliticial climate in which the book was written. However, you should be aware that among the events(?) that seem to have affected Bradbury were Nazism, Stalinism and McCarthyism. I don't know how far you have got with your research in this area - if you are at an early stage, I would recommend getting hold of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. It has some excellent themed essays which will help you place the literature in context.

Bradbury's biography (The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller) would also be a good place to look.

I hope this helps!

Max, what he says now is this.

I recently got a copy of The Greenhaven Press Literary Companion To Fahrenheit 451 and it is really revealing as to his reasonings behind the writing of this book, also his thinking at the time in regards to a lot of different sub catagories that all come into play to add to the whole of this magnificent classic including totalitarianism. My copy is a mint condition hardback I purchased at a used bookstore at an almost unbelievably low price. Almost a steal hehe.