The following is the introduction by Ray Bradbury to the illustrated adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. I love what he says about the connection between writing and the author.
"Back in 1950, I dined out one night with a friend. Later in the evening we were walking along Wilshire Boulevard when a police car stopped and an officer got out and asked us what we were doing.
'Putting one foot in front of the other,' I said, not very helpfully.
The policeman kept questioning us as to why we were being pedestrians, as if by taking a late-night stroll we were coming perilously close to breaking the law. Irritated, I went home and wrote a story called 'The Pedestrian.'
Several weeks later, I took my pedestrian out for a literary walk where he encountered a young girl named Clarisse McClellan. Seven days later, the first draft of The Fireman was finished, which was the novella that turned into Fahrenheit 451 not long after.
Some years later, looking back, I thought 'The Pedestrian' was the true source of Fahrenheit 451, but my memory was incorrect. I now realize other things were at work in my subconscious.
It is only now, some fifty years after that L.A. police officer challenged my right to be a pedestrian, that I see the odd ideas that rose to perform in short stories, which went unnoticed as I wrote them.
I wrote a tale about the greatest fantasy authors in history being exiled to Mars while their books were burned on Earth. That became a story called 'The Exiles.'
I wrote another tale, 'Usher II,' in which my hero complains that he, as a fantasy writer, is rejected by the intellectuals on Earth who make fun of the grotesques that sprang up in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and other similar authors.
And years before that, I published another novella, called Pillar Of Fire, in which a dead man rises from the grave to reenact the strange lives of Dracula and Frankenstein's monster.
All of these stories were forgotten when I first wrote Fahrenheit 451. But they were still there, somewhere, percolating in my subconscious.
What you have before you now is a further rejuvenation of a book that was once a short novel that was once a short story that was once a walk around the block, a rising up in a graveyard, and a final fall of the House of Usher.
My subconscious is more complicated than I ever imagined. I've learned over the years to let it run rampant and offer me its ideas as they come, giving them no preference and no special treatment. When the time is right, somehow they coalesce and erupt from my subconscious and spill onto the page.
In the case of the final version of Fahrenheit 451, illustrated here, I brought all my characters onstage again and ran them through my typewriter, letting my fingers tell the stories and bring forth the ghosts of other tales from other times.
I am the hero, Montag, and a good part of me is also Clarisse McClellan. A darker side of me is the fire chief, Beatty, and my philosophical capacities are represented by the philosopher Faber.
I put them all together, shook them up, and poured them forth, pretending not to notice what I was doing. At the end of a number of days and a further number of weeks, I had a novel.
Thank god that I didn't, at any time in the last twenty or thirty years, know exactly what I was doing, so that each of these parts of me was able to step forth and declare itself. Each character in Fahrenheit 451 has his or her moment of truth; I stayed quietly in the background and let them declaim and never interrupted.
So what you have here, now, is a pastiche of my former lives, my former fears, my inhibitions, and my strange and mysterious and unrecognized prediction of the future.
I say all this to inform any teachers or students reading this book that what I did was name a metaphor and let myself run free, allowing my subconscious to surface with all kinds of wild ideas.
Similarly, in the future, if some teacher suggests to his or her students that they conceive metaphors and write essays or stories about them, the young writers should take care not to intellectualize or be self-conscious or overanalyze their metaphors; They should let the metaphors race as fast and furious and freely as possible so that what is stirred up are all the hidden truths at the bottom of the writer's mind.
It would not be proper for me, fifty years on, to overanalyze and pontificate about my book, because it was written by the other me, by the inner self, by the fun-loving and free-ranging young Ray Bradbury.
Finally, may I suggest that anyone reading this introduction should take the time to name the one book that he or she would most want to memorize and protect from any censors or 'firemen.' And not only name the book, but give the reasons why they would wish to memorize it and why it would be a valuable asset to be recited and remembered in the future. I think this would make for a lively session when my readers meet and tell the books they named and memorized, and why."
