Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury

Written in the early 1950s, this is a look at a future America, an America where all serious literature has been banned, including works of philosophy and religion. In this society where houses no longer catch fire accidentally, a new role has been created for the firemen: now instead of fighting fires they start fires, specifically, they burn books. And they burn the homes and possessions of anyone caught with banned books.
Montag is one such fireman. He claims to love his job. He claims to never think twice about what he does. And yet, he has a secret stash of books hidden in his own house. He even has a Bible and has memorized whole sections of it. His wife is totally unaware of this illegal activity of his.
But, after talking to a young neighbor who opens his eyes to the real world, he admits that he is not happy, in fact, he knows no one who is happy. Although the society they live in is designed to keep people amused and occupied, still it is all superficial and most people are quietly miserable. Including Montag's wife, Millie, who tries to kill herself by swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills. All the activity and fun of their modern lives, their escapist TV shows and trashy books and magazines, their shopping and rushing around and sports and games, basically their lives are unfulfilling and meaningless. And they know it, the proof is all around them with murders, violence, suicides and impending war.
Montag goes a little nuts and forces a couple friends of his wife to listen as he reads to them. He is desperate to wake people up, to point out the fog they are living in and he gives himself away. His fellow firemen arrive to seize and burn his books and his home. Not surprisingly, his neighbors turned him in and so did his wife. She believes she is comfortable in her familiar routine and she is against his new militancy.
Montag's boss makes him burn his own books and house. But then Montag uses his firestarter on his boss, burning him alive. He flees the city, with a mechanical blood hound on his trail.

This is a story about a society that in some ways resembles our own. Montag is a guy who has just been going through the motions and experiences a crisis when he begins to question and struggle against the established way of thinking, or not thinking, as in his world thinking is very much not approved of or encouraged in any way. In his world, critical thinking is no longer taught in schools and is actively discouraged. Education has become less about knowledge and more about lots of activities, keeping the kiddies busy and amused and when they are grown, more of the same, resulting in a population that is rudderless and drifting and depressed without understanding why. It's an interesting look at a world gone terribly wrong, manifested by the book-burning firemen and their callous destruction of the accumulated wisdom of the centuries.