I think there are a lot of young men in the world who might thank me for helping Hugh Hefner at the right time! He bought my novella and it appeared in the second, third and fourth issues of Playboy. I said, “I have Fahrenheit 451, and you can have it for that money.” He had only $450 with which to buy a property. It was very difficult to find a new publisher in magazine form before the book was published.Ī young editor who was starting a new magazine approached me. That was the summer when Joseph McCarthy was running rampant in Washington with his threats to the libraries and his investigation of supposed communist backgrounds of screenwriters. Fahrenheit 451.” So I rushed to my typewriter and placed the new title on my book. Just reverse it and it has a nicer sound. When he came back, he said, “451 Fahrenheit.” Fire Department and spoke to the chief and said, “I know that this is silly, but could you tell me the temperature at which book paper catches fire?” I finally said, how stupid! Call the fire department, they might have the answer. I called the USC science department, and they had no information. I called the UCLA chemistry department, but they couldn’t tell me. I wondered at what temperature book paper caught fire I hadn’t bothered to look up the temperature at that time. So I listened to them again and in the summer of 1953 went back to the library basement and finished the work on the longer version of The Fireman. I knew that Faber, a recluse, fearful of being out in society, had more insight and philosophy to gift me with. I knew that Clarisse McClellan had something to say about her fancies and about the culture she survived in. I knew that Beatty, the Fire Captain, had more to offer about his history of book burning. I listen to my characters, I watch them and I put down their reactions. I called the characters back and asked them to speak to me, which is how I do all of my writing. I said that I could, because there was so much I hadn’t yet said. Two years later, Ballantine Books asked if I could add 25,000 words to the original novella. The Fireman was published in the January issue of Galaxy Magazine in 1951. When I finished, I didn’t know what I had done. 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. It was a passionate and exciting time for me. The wonderful thing about writing Fahrenheit 451, which I called The Fireman the first time out, was the fact that I could run up and down stairs in the library and seize books off the shelf, not knowing what I was going to find next, opening the books and discovering quotes to rush back down to the typing room to insert in my novel. So, exhilarated, I got a bag of dimes and settled into the room, and in nine days, I spent $9.80 and wrote my story in other words, it was a dime novel. I went to investigate and found a room with 12 typewriters that could be rented for 10 cents a half-hour. I had no money for an office, and while wandering around UCLA, I heard typing from the basement of Powell Library. I had a newborn child at home, and the house was loud with her cries of exaltation at being alive. But first I had to find a place to write. You’re the fireman who burns books.”Ī little more than a week later, my first version of what would become Fahrenheit 451 was finished. A few months later, I took “The Pedestrian” out for a stroll, and when he turned a corner, he was confronted by a teenage girl named Clarisse McClellan, who took a deep breath and said, “I know who you are, from the smell of the kerosene. I had written a short story called “The Pedestrian” about a future in which it’s illegal to walk on the streets. Since I’m a library person, having educated myself in the libraries of Los Angeles, all of this concerned me, and the older I got the more I wanted to write stories about libraries and books. As I was growing up, I saw photographs of Hitler’s burning of the books in the Berlin streets and later on heard about Lenin’s and Stalin’s library purges and assassinations of authors. Sometime in the years 1948 and ’49 I wrote a series of stories about book burning in world history, starting with the Alexandrian libraries 3,000 years ago, which burned twice by accident and once on purpose.
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