A Fireman Who Starts Fires

Published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 follows Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is not to extinguish fires but to burn books. Ray Bradbury wrote the first draft in just nine days, feeding dimes into a rented typewriter in the basement of the UCLA library — surrounded by the very books his novel imagined burning.

The title refers to 451 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature Bradbury believed paper would auto-ignite. The irony of a book about destroying books became one of American literature's most famous paradoxes.