October 19, 1953: Ray Bradbury Publishes "Fahrenheit 451"

October 19, 1953: Ray Bradbury publishes Fahrenheit 451. Although set in an indeterminate future, it is not really science fiction, the genre for which he is best known.

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, outside Chicago. In his stories, he fictionalized Waukegan, famously also the hometown of comedian Jack Benny, as "Green Town, Illinois." Due to his father's search for work during the Great Depression, the family twice moved to Tucson, Arizona, and back to Waukegan. When he was 14, the family moved to Los Angeles.

Being close to the Hollywood film studios, Bradbury wanted to meet celebrities. He met comedian George Burns, and, at age 14, he sold Burns a joke that was used on the Burns and Allen radio show. He also met Ray Harryhausen, the special effects pioneer who would one day work on films based on Bradbury's stories.

As a boy, Bradbury was fascinated by the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs -- not so much his most famous character, Tarzan, as his second-most-famous: John Carter of Mars. These stories set on "Barsoom" (the Martians' name for their home planet) would inspire his breakthrough novel, The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950.

Bradbury was inspired by the "Red Scare" of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Between 1947 and 1948, he wrote "Bright Phoenix," a short story about a librarian who confronts a "Chief Censor," who burns books. An encounter Bradbury had in 1949 with the police inspired him to write the short story "The Pedestrian" in 1951. In this story, a man going for a nighttime walk in his neighborhood is harassed and detained by the police. In the society of "The Pedestrian", citizens are expected to watch television as a leisurely activity, a detail that would be included in Fahrenheit 451.

Elements of both "Bright Phoenix" and "The Pedestrian" would be combined into The Fireman, a novella published in 1951. Bradbury was urged by Stanley Kauffmann, a publisher at Ballantine Books, to make The Fireman into a full novel. Bradbury finished the manuscript for Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and the novel was published later that year.

The title page of the book explains the title as follows: "Fahrenheit 451 -- The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns...." On inquiring about the temperature at which paper would catch fire, Bradbury had been told that 451 degrees Fahrenheit was the autoignition temperature of paper. In various studies, scientists have placed the autoignition temperature at a range of temperatures between 424 and 475 °F, depending on the type of paper.

Although Bradbury initially intended the book in support of freedom of speech and of the press, and as a screed against censorship, he later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature. In a 1994 interview, he seemed to shift from left to right, citing political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, calling it "the real enemy these days," and labelling it as "thought control and freedom of speech control."

Adaptations of the novel include a 1966 film directed by François Truffaut, starring Oskar Werner as "fireman" Guy Montag, and a 2018 HBO film starring Michael B. Jordan.

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October 19, 1953 was a Monday. Basketball star Lionel Hollins was born on this day. This was also the day on which Arthur Godfrey fired singer Julius LaRosa from his TV and radio show. I have a separate entry for that event.

The baseball season had ended 2 weeks earlier, when the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. Football was in midweek. And no NBA or NHL games were scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.