Ray Bradbury
Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California
Marker Inscription
"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together in on garment for us." Ray Badbury, Fahrenheit 451. In commemoration of author Ray Badbury writing Fahrenheit 451 in 1950 and 1953 at this site, the UCLA Library's former typewriter rental room.
The Story
In the early 1950s a young Ray Bradbury, unable to write in peace at home, rented a coin-operated typewriter in the basement of UCLA's library and hammered out the story that became Fahrenheit 451. The dystopian novel about book-burning and a society that fears memory was famously composed for a few dollars in dimes. Fittingly, he wrote his defense of books surrounded by them.
Why it matters
It grounds one of America's most enduring warnings about censorship and the fragility of ideas in a humble university basement.
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