Irony In Fahrenheit 451 Quotes

Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony...

In one of the great ironies of literary history, Fahrenheit 451 was itself silently modified in the 1960s to make the novel more likely to win school-board approval as a classroom text. A special “Bal-Hi” edition, first printed in 1967, retained the typesetting of the first edition, but the text was altered at nearly a hundred points to remove profanity and references to sexuality, drinking, drug use, and nudity. 7 This version was never intended to replace the mass-market paperback, but beginning in 1973 the censored text was accidentally transferred to successive printings of the commercial text.