Interestingly, the impetus for the characters and the situation of Fahrenheit 451 date earlier than "The Fireman." They first appeared during the years immediately following World War II, as Bradbury reveals in his introduction to Pillar of Fire and Other Plays (Bantam, 1975):
This story ["Pillar of Fire," Planet Stories, Summer 1948], this character . . . I see now were rehearsals for my later novel and film Fahrenheit 451. If Montag is a burner of books who wakens to reading and becomes obsessed with saving mind-as-printed-upon-matter, then Lantry [protagonist of "Pillar of Fire"] is the books themselves, he is the thing to be saved. In an ideal world, he and Montag would have met, set up shop, and lived happily ever after: library and saver of libraries, book and reader, idea and flesh to preserve the idea.
By Bradbury's own admission, the thematic obsession that explicitly emerges in Fahrenheit 451 is the burning of books, the destruction of mind-as-printed-upon-matter. And although Bradbury never uses the word "censorship" in the novel, one should be aware that he is deeply concerned with censorship. Book burning is a hyperbolic phrase that describes the suppression of writing, but the real issue of the novel is censorship.
If "Pillar of Fire" is read sensitively, one finds that not all books are in danger in the future dystopia (an imaginary world where people lead dehumanized, fearful lives), but particular kinds, or genres, of books are at risk. This theme, of course, is not precisely true of Fahrenheit 451 in which all books that are burned by the "firemen" are in danger. This novel may be understood as a kind of hyperbolic extension of the tensions of the earlier story.
