This course provides an introduction to Ray Bradbury's 1953 masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451.

Bradbury was writing in a time of seismic political and technological change. World War II, where Nazis had regularly held book-burning rallies, had ended only eight years earlier. Since then, the world had entered the atomic age as well as the advent of the Cold War.

In America, cars and televisons began to permeate every neighbourhood. With the advent of the McCarthy hearings, certain books were becoming like dirty words - something only a communist would read. Intellectuals were hounded and suspicion trailed them wherever they went.

This is the backdrop to Fahrenheit 451, where Bradbury imagines a world in pursuit of instant gratifications - a world all too familiar to the citizens of the modern age.

This course begins by offering an overview of the novel's plot, broken into the three sub-sections - The Hearth and The Salamander, The Sieve and The Sand and Burning Bright.

Later sections examine the major characters of the book as well as the principal themes.

An independent mind map of the novel and also relevant quotes are provided as memory aids.

Finally, there is a short quiz to test what you have learned.

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Fahrenheit 451

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