10 Famous Books You've Been Reading Wrong This Whole Time

To highlight how widely misunderstood this book is: Ray Bradbury once stormed out of a university lecture he was giving on Fahrenheit 451 because the students in attendance insisted he didn't understand what the book was about. His book. That he wrote.

People tend to pick up on the book-burning as a theme in Fahrenheit 451, probably because it's such a dramatic, viscerally upsetting image; and in that context we can draw on history (once again, the Nazis ruining everything).

Because the burning of books is the part of the book that sticks with you, we assume that's the point and that it relates to censorship.

Bradbury's major intent was to direct attention to what he perceived as the collective dumbing down of people, largely exacerbated by television. He felt television allowed people to be spoon-fed information at the discretion of those who create programming, and at the expense of individual thought.

Bradbury did change his mind several times on key issues, including what the point of Fahrenheit 451 actually was, so those students at that lecture may have had a point.