The Manly Way Ray Bradbury Wrote Fahrenheit 451

Photo by Alan Light

Ray Bradbury wrote the first draft of what would become Fahrenheit 451 (originally a shorter novella titled The Fireman) in the basement typing room of UCLA's Powell Library. It was the early 1950s and he didn’t have the money for an office or quiet time at home due to his young children, so he discovered that UCLA had coin-operated rental typewriters. They charged 10 cents for 30 minutes. When 30 minutes was up he’d have to drop another dime in from a bag of dimes he brought with him.

Over about nine days he dropped 98 dimes into a slot on a typewriter to complete 25,000 words.

“It was a passionate and exciting time for me,” said Bradbury in a 2002 UCLA magazine piece. “Imagine what it was like to be writing a book about book burning and doing it in a library where the passions of all those authors, living and dead, surrounded me.”

He later expanded the novella into a still slim dystopian thriller. It was published in 1953. The story highlights his love of libraries—he often said they “raised” him—and the urgency that drove the writing process.

So, lines like these came from a man beneath a library as his nostrils were filmed with the aroma of books.

• “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.” —Guy Montag, pondering the old woman's suicide by fire

• “The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us.” —Faber, explaining the true value of literature

• “Stuff your eyes with wonder …  live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” —Faber, urging Montag to embrace life and knowledge

  At the end of my copy of Fahrenheit is an essay on censorship Bradbury added to later editions. In it he writes about all the people who wrote him letters saying how great the novel is, but also asking for additions and subtractions to the text. To all of these other censors he wrote that no one can help him, "not even you."