Sioux Falls Business Journal

The three main sections of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” all end in fire. The novel focuses on Guy Montag, a professional book burner. For years he has done his job obediently and well. Then one day, he pockets some books, haunted by the idea that a life without books might not be worth living after all.  

The book’s final section finds Montag seizing his own fate as he strikes out for the countryside. While society stares at full-wall television screens and medicates itself into a coma, Montag finds a resistance force of readers, each one responsible for memorizing – and thereby preserving – the entire contents of a different book.

The book’s three holocausts expand concentrically, and, in the end, trouble down the street leads to trouble at home, and trouble at home to trouble abroad. For a book once pigeonholed as science fiction, its structural savvy is more proof that Bradbury started out writing for the pulps and wound up writing for the ages.

– Kelley Yseth, director, Center for the Book, South Dakota Humanities Council