Fifty-six years after Ray Bradbury wrote the first draft of Fahrenheit 451 in nine days — it came like an "explosion" of words, he says — his science-fiction classic is being reissued today as a graphic novel.

"It's beautiful," says Bradbury, who turns 89 on Aug. 22, and harbors hopes that a new movie version will be made in his lifetime of a future in which literature is banned and firemen burn books.

Fahrenheit remains a staple of high school and college reading lists, which prompts a question: Does Bradbury worry that students will read just the graphic novel?

"I don't know, but I know when I was 5 years old, my parents gave me an illustrated version of Beauty and the Beast, and I loved it so much that I decided that I had to learn to read, and I did."

He adds, "When I was 9, the Buck Rogers comics took me to the future, and I never came back."

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury's authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship. Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.