Fahrenheit 451

Guy Montag is a fireman in a city where firemen do not put out fires. They start them. His job is to burn books and the houses that hide them, and he has never asked why until a seventeen-year-old neighbor named Clarisse asks whether he is happy. Bradbury published the novel in 1953, expanding a short story called "The Fireman" into a warning about a country that stopped reading on its own. The man who memorizes books after the city burns is not a hero who wins. He is a survivor who chooses to remember.

Montag is the fireman with kerosene and a Mechanical Hound at his heel: trained to destroy, numb to the ash, married to a woman who calls the people on her wall-sized screens her family. Mildred Montag is his wife, pale from sleeping pills and three-wall television, unable to name what is missing because the noise will not let her think. Clarisse McClellan is the neighbor who counts raindrops, tastes rain, and asks questions the city has trained out of adults. Captain Beatty is the fire chief who quotes books while ordering them burned, the most dangerous kind of enemy because he already knows what Montag is discovering. Professor Faber is a retired English teacher hiding in earphones and a two-way radio, afraid but willing to help once Montag stops performing rebellion and starts risking it. Granger leads the book people on the riverbank, each carrying a text memorized so the words survive even when the paper is ash.