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."

The HP Wright library in Ventura is threatened with closure due to cuts in public funding, unless it raises $280,000 by next March. Bradbury's event was the first in a year-long series of author appearances designed to help keep the 44-year-old library open. The $25 ticket offered patrons the chance to hear a talk from the author of Fahrenheit 451, as well as see a screening of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, a film based on one of his short stories.

Bradbury said that he had spoken at all of California's 200-odd libraries. "I have a wheelchair, so they carry me to the car, and they throw me in the car, and throw me in the library, and they sell books and they keep all the money. I talk free, to make money for them so they can continue," he told the New York Times. "All libraries are special."

Although the 88-year-old Bradbury is vehemently anti-internet – it's "a big distraction ... It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere," he told the Times – he is very much pro-library. "Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years," he said. "I read everything in the library. I read everything. I took out 10 books a week so I had a couple of hundred books a year I read, on literature, poetry, plays, and I read all the great short stories, hundreds of them. I graduated from the library when I was 28 years old. That library educated me, not the college."

"I'm surrounded by my metaphors," said Mr. Bradbury, who acknowledges that the science in his books is often faulty and serves only as a vehicle for his fiction. He'll provide the inspiration, he says, and let the scientists worry about the particulars. "The arts and sciences are connected," he continued. "Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination."

*****

Mr. Bradbury, who stopped the regular reading of science fiction decades ago, is comfortable in his outsider status, if a bit cantankerous. "I don't need to be vindicated, and I don't want attention," he said. "I never question. I never ask anyone else's opinion. They don't count."

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.