Despite all the rich possibilities of exploration in Fahrenheit 451, the issue of book burning, or censorship, remains most central to the novel and is the most difficult issue with which to grapple. In essence, book burning is synonymous with irrationality in the twentieth century. The genesis of Fahrenheit 451 was presumably contagious with the period of Nazi anti-intellectualism during the late 1930s, and book burning certainly became a synonym for anti-intellectualism in science fiction of the 1950s — as it was in Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (Lippincott, 1959). Fahrenheit 451 emerged during a period of extreme interest in what Brian W. Aldiss calls "an authoritarian society" that roughly corresponds to the years 1945-1953, as revealed in George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1948); B.F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948); Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952); Evelyn Waugh's Love Among the Ruins (1953); and Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1953). Moreover, the postwar period also produced several novels and films concerned with the possibilities of nuclear holocaust, which hovers over Montag's world throughout the novel.
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