Although I d read plenty of Bradbury, I d never come across a copy of Fahrenheit 451 until my junior year of high school. I was told in a journalism class that it had once been banned. I was told the same thing about The Naked Ape, Soul on Ice, Huckleberry Finn. I read Fahrenheit solely to find out why it had been banned. And because it was Bradbury.[return][return]By my junior year of high school, I had a quite well developed superiority complex. For years I d felt very different from my friends. Probably starting in about 4th grade. The more I read, the more I knew that my friends didn t. I had very few friends that read as much as I did and that thought as much as I did. I was too ugly to have a girlfriend, so I didn t circulate with the social crowd. There were a few smart kids in that group but almost none in the group that I was left in. The distance grew over the years until I got to high school. By then, I was alone in the world. Or I thought I was.[return][return]In my junior year, I met another outcast who hadn t yet learned how to hide it. He was in my graphic arts class getting called names by some female socialite that he was irritating. But I could tell that he was different and that he was deliberately toying with her. I asked him later, quite frankly, Are you one of us? He knew exactly what I meant and said yes. Philip was my first real friend.[return][return]That was the age at which I read Bradbury s critique of American society. I took it as gospel. It was exactly what I wanted to hear. I stopped watching TV. I read even more some non-fiction even. I plotted with Philip on the phone for hours at a time like a girlfriend. I had a couple of girlfriends by then but that was hardly an intellectual stimulation except for maybe the effect it had on my budding ego.[return][return]We began plotting about starting an underground newspaper at school. We would use pen names and open it up for any student to contribute instead of just journalism class members. It was fun. I was Guy Montag. I wrote articles about what little politics I understood, juvenile sociology and made up gags like fake horoscopes. ( )