Bradbury had no office and no quiet corner at home, just a young family and a small, noisy apartment. So he went looking for a typewriter he could rent by the hour, and he found one underground.

The Direct Answer
In the basement typing room of UCLA's Powell Library.
He drafted the novella that became Fahrenheit 451 on a coin-operated typewriter there in nine days, an origin he laid out in the book's later afterword.

A Dime Every Half Hour

In the spring of 1950, wandering through the UCLA campus, Bradbury stumbled into a room beneath Powell Library lined with pay typewriters. Each machine cost ten cents per half hour. For a broke writer with two daughters and a wife at home, that was both a problem and a gift. He went to the bank, came back with a bag of dimes, fed one into the slot, and raced the clock. When the typewriter stopped, he stopped, until the next dime dropped in and bought him another thirty minutes.

He kept this going for nine days straight. By the end he'd spent exactly $9.80, which works out to 98 dimes and just under 50 hours at the keys. As he liked to tell it afterward, that price tag made Fahrenheit 451 a literal dime novel. The pressure of the meter turned out to be a feature rather than a bug. He couldn't sit and stare into space, because every half hour was money draining away. So he typed fast, committed to the sentence in front of him, and kept moving.

It's worth saying why he was down there in the first place. At home he had two small daughters and not much space. The typewriter at the apartment meant interruptions, and an interruption to Bradbury was a thousand words that never got written. The library room gave him something the apartment couldn't, which was a hard boundary. He showed up, he paid, he worked, and the cost itself kept him honest about the time.

In nine days, I spent $9.80 and wrote my story; in other words, it was a dime novel.

Ray Bradbury, afterword to Fahrenheit 451

The Library Was Part of the Method

The basement wasn't only cheap. It put Bradbury inside the very kind of building his story was burning down. When he stalled, he'd climb the stairs into the stacks, pull a book off the shelf, find a line he loved, and run it back down to fold into his draft. He often said he was library educated rather than college educated, and writing a novel about firemen torching books while surrounded by thousands of them was the perfect circle for a man who felt that way.

The draft he hammered out there carried a different name. He called it The Fireman, a novella, and only later expanded it into the full novel when a publisher asked for more. The famous title arrived after that, once he phoned a local fire department to ask the temperature at which book paper catches and burns. The answer they gave him, 451 degrees Fahrenheit, became one of the best-known titles in American fiction. All of it traces back to that underground room and a man feeding dimes into a rented machine.

Bradbury never wrote in fancy spaces after that, and he never seemed to want to. The lesson he took from the basement was that constraint helps. A small, ugly, metered room with a deadline ticking in the slot got more out of him than comfort ever did. To see how this stretch of work fit his lifelong habits, read the full Ray Bradbury writing routine.

What You Can Steal