The novel Fahrenheit 451, written by Ray Bradbury, was published in 1953 not long after World War II had ended. Bradbury had written a short story about Guy Montag, the main character in Fahrenheit 451 in 1951. Bradbury used this novel that was written as a science fiction to criticize the society of his time, and to warn of a possible future. The basis of the censorship in the novel is based on the anti-intellectualism pushed forward by Hitler and the Nazi regime. Another important factor, even more important to Bradbury than the anti-intellectualism of the Nazi's, that led Bradbury to write Fahrenheit 451 was the red scare and McCarthyism in the United States. .
During the time period in which Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 the Nazi's had imposed on Germany and the countries they held control of a censorship in which they tried to remove all literature that could educate the people. If the people stayed stupid then they would be unable to revolt against the regime. In this way they held the people under their control by keeping them stupid. In the novel Bradbury uses censorship as a way in which the government has control over the people. People are not allowed to read books of any kind, so therefore they are uneducated in the normal way of speaking. These uneducated people are therefore unable to think for themselves. As it is said in the novel Montag's wife, Mildred stays in her house and watches her T.V. She spends all of her time with her "relatives" which are the people on her programs. .
In the years before Bradbury wrote his novel influential social criticisms via fiction as Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 and Skinner's Walden Two were published. These novels gave way for Bradbury to criticize the society in which he lived and to warn of upcoming danger of how society could become. Bradbury also used Fahrenheit 451 as a way to protest what he believed to be the invasiveness of editors who, through their strict control of the books they printed, impaired the originality and creativity of writers.
