“Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”

Themes: censorship, alienation, apathy, technology

While there are various thematic concerns in Fahrenheit 451, the issue of book burning, or censorship, remains most central. Book burning is synonymous with irrationality in the twentieth century. There are numerous historical allusions in Fahrenheit 451, most notably the period of Nazi anti-intellectualism during the late 1930s.

Book burning was a popular symbol of anti-intellectualism in science fiction of the 1950s — as it was in Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (Lippincott, 1959). Fahrenheit 451 emerged during a period of extreme interest in what Brian W. Aldiss calls “an authoritarian society” that roughly corresponds to the years 1945-1953, as revealed in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1948); B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948); Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952); Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins (1953); and Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1953).

The Cold War period also produced several novels and films concerned with the possibilities of nuclear holocaust, which hovers over Montag’s world throughout Fahrenheit 451.
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The novel also appears during the era known as the McCarthy period, the postwar US political climate characterized by xenophobia, blacklisting, and censorship. In June 1949, for example, Representative John S. Wood asked some seventy colleges to submit their textbooks for examination and approval by the Un-American Activities Committee.

Bradbury himself (Nation, May 2, 1953), in an article on science fiction as social criticism, suggested that “when the wind is right, a faint odour of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy.”

Many of the issues explored in the novel cannot be separated from the historical period in which they appeared. However, the novel was also popular in the 1980s when censorship in schools and libraries resurged.

Other important themes include the use of drugs and media to create a mindless, obedient populace.

Source: http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/Fahrenheit-451-About-Fahrenheit-451-Historical-Influences-for-Fahrenheit-451.id-106,pageNum-19.html

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