Every year in the U.S., book bans get worse and worse, and this year isn’t any different. Most recently, PEN America released its book ban report for 2024-2025 on Oct. 1, warning about the normalization of book bans in America. This report details how the book bans have kept increasing, with things like state-wide bans being implemented in the U.S.
The modern-day movement to censor books is becoming eerily similar to Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 takes place in a society where books are completely outlawed and warns of the dangerous repercussions of what it truly means to ban books. Book bans go beyond removing a book from a library; they’re also a form of censorship.
Book Bans in the United States
Similar to the plot of Fahrenheit 451, censorship in the U.S. has reached extreme levels, and the censorship of books in schools is becoming a widespread issue. PEN America reported that during the 2024-2025 school year, they recorded “6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts.” Since PEN America started tracking book bans in 2021, those numbers have totaled to “22,810 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts.”
This is a decrease from 2023-2024, which had 10,046 cases of book bans; however, this may be because of three different reasons.
First, PEN America’s report only reflects cases reported to their organization. If a book ban wasn’t reported, it’s not reflected in the total number that PEN America tracks and records each school year.
Second, if a book is banned from a school, all of the other copies of that book are also pulled from the school. That means that commonly banned books have already been pulled from libraries and aren’t available, so those books aren’t reflected in PEN America’s report.
Third, if a book was already banned in a school in a previous year, PEN America doesn’t include that prohibited title in their newer reports. The data only “chronicles the books removed from shelves within the last school year,” and not any years prior.
There are also three new indexes within PEN America’s report, which sort book bans into three different categories: a title-level index, a district-level index, and a state-mandated bans index. The title-level index includes a list of all of the books banned in school districts, and the district-level index “presents data on book bans by district, including the total number of books banned.”
The state-mandated bans index is the most concerning because it “captures an unprecedented phenomenon in the book banning crisis.” These bans remove certain titles from schools state-wide. An example of this is Utah’s “no-read list,” which is a list of 13 books to be removed from all of the schools throughout the state. This includes books like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, as well as Sarah J. Maas’ entire A Court of Thorns and Roses series.
What makes these state-mandated bans so concerning is the amount of control governments are exercising over censoring books. The U.S. is approaching the same territory of control and censorship as in Fahrenheit 451, which is becoming more than just a fictional story — it serves as a precautionary tale for what happens when book bans become too extreme.
Censorship in Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 follows Guy Montag, who works as a firefighter. However, in the setting of the novel, firefighters don’t put out fires: they start them. Montag’s job is to go to the houses of people who own books and burn them down with the books inside. Fahrenheit 451 is also named after the temperature at which book pages catch fire and burn, 451 degrees Fahrenheit, which drives home the themes of censorship in the novel.
Books are outlawed in Fahrenheit 451 because they promote individualism through free thought. Books are a way for us to learn about ourselves and the world around us, provoking critical thinking. In Fahrenheit 451, this means that book bans are a way to control the population.
Beatty, Montag’s fire captain, parrots this idea, telling Montag, “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone is made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.”
Books show us everything about life: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. They also teach us about real people and their identities. Book bans in Fahrenheit 451 are similar to book bans in the U.S. because they both go beyond the pages of a novel and have real-world implications.
Beyond the Page
In PEN America’s 2023-2024 report, the organization found that “disproportionate to publishing rates and like prior school years, books in this prominent subset overwhelmingly include books with people and characters of color (44%) and books with LGBTQ+ people and characters (39%).”
Censorship extends beyond the page, as it has far-reaching implications that go beyond the story itself. Book bans are a form of censorship that erases people, their identities, and their stories. This is why Fahrenheit 451 should be read as a precautionary tale of the concerning rise of book bans in the United States: the book is a warning of what happens when book bans become too extreme, which is happening in this country.
While I don’t think we’re completely in a society like Fahrenheit 451, I do think we’re getting dangerously close to the same levels of censorship. We’re not burning books like the firemen in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, but the effect of book bans is still the same.
Fahrenheit 451 is also an example of how books help us learn about the world, and therefore the dangers of banning books. Although Bradbury’s novel was released over 50 years ago, the book serves as a warning that we should take into account in the U.S today.
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