SOURCE: "Fahrenheit 451," in Ray Bradbury, Twayne Publishers, 1986, pp. 105-11.

In the following excerpt, Mogen provides favorable analysis of Fahrenheit 451, citing Bradbury's use of satire, metaphor, and stylistic excellence to deliver social commentary.

If The Martian Chronicles (1950) established Bradbury's mainstream reputation as America's foremost science-fiction writer, publication of Fahrenheit 451 three years later (1953) confirmed the promise of the earlier book. Indeed, these two science-fiction novels from the early fifties seem destined to survive as Bradbury's best-known and most influential creations, the most sustained expressions of his essentially lyrical treatment of science-fiction conventions. The Martian Chronicles presents the pioneering space romance in a distinctive tone of poignant irony and elegy; Fahrenheit 451 counterpoises this ironic otherworldly drama with a searing vision of earthbound entrapment, evoking a painfully ambivalent poetry of incineration and illumination from the conventions of antiutopian fiction. Whereas The Martian Chronicles portrays entrapment in memory, the difficulty of accepting and...