i think you should read the coda again

In the coda, Bradbury is angry about what he describes as censorship, but there are a lot of different complaints all jostled together under that one big umbrella. There’s anger at the editors of Ballantine Books, who removed the words “damn” and “hell” from their edition of Fahrenheit 451. There’s anger at anthology editors who bowdlerized great authors when putting together a compilation of the classics for school readers. But most of his anger is aimed at the threat he believes to be posed by minorities.

He is angry at a “solemn young Vassar lady” who asked whether he might write more female characters. He is angry at other readers who disapprove of how he wrote “the blacks” in one of his stories. He is angry at “the Irish,” “the Chicano intellectuals,” at “every minority” that has some perspective on his stories at variance with his. In his own words, every last one of them “feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse…. Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.”

In the coda, most of Bradbury’s anger is aimed at the threat he believes to be posed by minorities.

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