Fahrenheit 451: Building Background

This week we began our unit on Ray Bradbury's masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451. Fahrenheit 451 is arguably the best dystopian novel (a science fiction story about a future world that is flawed in some significant way) ever written. It was written in 1953, over 60 years ago now. Reading old novels like this one that try to imagine a future time that we've already reached can be very interesting. For example, in Fahrenheit 451 the main character at one point tells us, "We've fought and won two atomic wars since 1990." From the point of view of 1953 where everyone in America was afraid of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, this is understandable.

To best understand the the this world the author wrote about, it is important to learn about the author himself and the world he was writing in. This assignment asks you to work with a small group to learn about a topic related to this novel and then present your information to the class so we can all build some background about the novel before we get too far into it. Follow the steps on the assignment sheet below to complete this activity. Your groups have been posted to Classroom.