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."