Bradbury will visit campus that day and address the students about his 50-year-old novel, which deals with censorship, the role of government, and a bleak futuristic vision of a world of non-thinkers and non-readers. Bradbury also will speak at the Thomas Cooper Society luncheon Aug. 20 and will receive the Thomas Cooper Society Medal.

"We were considering Fahrenheit and Catcher in the Rye Both are celebrating their 50th anniversaries this year," said Don Greiner, associate provost and dean of undergraduate affairs and co-founder of the First-Year Reading Experience. "When we learned there was a shot at getting Bradbury to come to campus, that settled it."

Bradbury, who spoke at USC two years ago, is a friend of Ann Hardin, wife of retired USC German literature professor James Hardin. Her personal and substantial collection of Bradbury's books will be on display at Thomas Cooper Library as part of the First-Year Reading Experience.

All Honors College freshmen and several hundred other randomly selected first-year students will be invited to the program. They will have read the novel before arriving on campus, then convene in small groups with faculty and staff discussion leaders following Bradbury's remarks.

The First-Year Reading Experience began in 1994 with Pat Conroy's The Water Is Wide, and has included William Faulkner's The Bear, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Lori Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

"First-Year Reading Experience started as an experiment and turned out to be much more successful than I ever imagined," Greiner said. "We'd love to make it available to all freshmen but currently don't have adequate meeting space for that near the center of campus."

In Fahrenheit 451, participants will consider Guy Montag, a 30-year-old futuristic fireman who starts fires instead of extinguishing them as part of the government's effort to stamp out book ownership and other "nonconformist" behavior. Montag keeps a secret stash of books--a dangerous crime in his society--and eventually joins a group of hobos who have memorized books in hopes of someday rebuilding a new, more open society.

"I am continually bothered by efforts to censor Huckleberry Finn, Slaughterhouse Five, The Scarlet Letter, and the Harry Potter Books," Greiner said. "With the renewed emphasis on banning books, we thought this would be a good book for our freshmen to consider because it examines what happens to a society that allows the government to decide what's OK."