By Ray Bradbury

Tobias Andersen and Robert O'Reilly

Director Terrence Shank and Playwright Ray Bradbury viewing a model of the set 

Back in 1950 I wrote a short novel THE FIREMAN in some 25,000 words, all written on a dime-each-half-hour pay typewriter located in the basement of the UCLA Library. I revised and added some 25,000 words more, working in the same library, in the summer of 1953. With its new title FARENHEIT 451, the book was published in October, 1953. The book’s genesis? Hanging around the Waukegan Fire House in northen Illinois when I was a boy, thinking about fireproof houses later on when I was a young man.

Now, twenty-six years after the novel’s publication, and thirteen years after Francois Truffaut’s evocative film, I called all of my characters together inside my head one night and said to them:
 

What’s new? What’s happened to all of you in the past years? In what secret ways have you grown? What can you tell me that you didn’t tell back in 1950 and 1953? We have all grown old together, the dreamer and the dreamed. Step forward now, and within the framework of the novel as it was, dare to tell me some new things about your most secret thoughts, both frightening and beautiful.

One of my characters stepped forward and spoke. I listened and wrote. The result, 8 weeks later, was the play which will now be performed.

Where did I find the title? I called the Los Angeles Fire Chief and asked the temperature at which book-paper caught fire and burned. His answer? FARENHEIT 451.