Only a year later, the West, to its alarm, discovered that the communist party was one of the three largest political parties in France. In 1945, the provisional French president Charles de Gaulle had allowed the country’s communist party to be included in its newly recreated political system. A scramble for spheres of influence, beginning with Germany, divided Europe and set in motion a world competition that was to last through the century.

The end of World War II five years earlier and the resulting disagreements about how to divide the spoils of war in a devastated Europe, and which system would win out there, had launched the Cold War. In what would come to be known as the Cold War, the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States-essentially a battle between capitalism and communism-were played out on numerous economic, political, and territorial fronts around the world, but primarily in Europe. Events in History at the Time of the Novel An uncertain eraīradbury wrote the story that would grow into Fahrenheit 451 in 1950, a time when relations between the world’s two most powerful nations were uneasy.

Themes of evil, or at least misused technology, and victory of the human spirit are the focus of Fahrenheit 451. From the beginning his short stories and novels showed a personal concern about what Bradbury perceived as the dehumanizing effect of the rapid growth of technology. When Ray Bradbury (1920-) graduated from high school, he was already committed to a writing career in science fiction. One day he encounters a teenaged girl, and their chance meeting leads the fireman to reexamine his life.Įvents in History at the Time of the Novel

Fahrenheit 451: The Temperature at Which Books BurnĪ science fiction novel set in a large American city in the near future published in 1953.Ī fireman lives in an era when the fire department has the task of starting fires to destroy books.

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