In a world where thinking for yourself is discouraged and reading is banned, Guy Montag is a cog in the machine. Working as a fireman -- a person who destroys and confiscates books from the public -- Guy upholds the very system that holds him back. But things change after a traumatic incident on the job. Shaken, Montag begins to question his work, his world, and himself. He starts to ask the questions we should all be asking: How much do I know? How much do I want to know? How much do I have the right to know?
Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television. When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.