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Ray Bradbury Born: Waukegan, Illinois August 22, 1920 Ray Bradbury Born: Waukegan, Illinois August 22, 1920 Bradbury played a leading role in winning a large readership for science fiction in the 1950’s by producing works with well- developed characters, provocative themes, and an attractive lit- erary style. Bradbury had begun writing stories and poems as soon as he learned how to write. He made his first sale as a teenager, contributing a sketch to the Thomas Victor George Burns and Gracie Allen radio comedy show. In high school, he also developed an interest Biography in theater that continued throughout his writing Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, career. on August 22, 1920, the son of Leonard Bradbury After finishing high school, Bradbury plunged and Esther Moberg Bradbury. One of his older into writing, trying to make himself quickly into twin brothers died before his birth, and a younger a professional. He joined a science-fiction organi- sister, Elizabeth, died in infancy when he was seven. zation, studied with science-fiction writer Robert Despite economic problems that took his family Heinlein, and worked with several other successful twice to Arizona in search of work, and despite the pulp fiction and screenwriters. He set himself the deaths of two siblings, Bradbury’s memory of his task of writing a story a week, while living at home early years is positive. In Dandelion Wine (1957) and and earning money selling newspapers. His first other works, his boyhood home in Waukegan be- published story was “Hollerbochen’s Dilemma,” comes Green Town, an idyllic if somewhat fragile which appeared in Imagination! in 1938. He wrote midwestern town, where children enjoy the plea- his first paid science-fiction story, “Pendulum,” in sures of playmates their age balanced with the op- collaboration with Henry Hasse, and it appeared in portunity for solitary explorations of a surround- Super Science Stories in 1941. Soon Bradbury was ing countryside. publishing regularly in pulp magazines such as In 1934, the family moved permanently to Los Weird Tales. Angeles, where Bradbury soon adapted to his sec- When he married Marguerite McClure in 1947, ond beloved home. Los Angeles attracted him, in he was a well-established writer, publishing more part, because it was a center of the entertainment than a dozen stories each year. “The Big Black and industry which Bradbury had loved since at least White Game” appeared in Best American Short Stories the age of three, when he saw the 1923 film The in 1945, and “Homecoming” was selected for the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Throughout his life, O. Henry Awards Prize Stories of 1947. In the year of Bradbury devoured the fiction of wonder and ad- his marriage, Arkham House published his first venture: radio, motion pictures, comic books, pulp story collection, Dark Carnival (1947); many of and slick magazines, and the novels of such authors these stories were reprinted in the highly regarded as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne. At the collection The October Country (1955). From then age of twelve, he and a friend found themselves un- on, his fiction was regularly recognized with awards able to await the next sequel in Burroughs’s Mars and selected for anthologies. In 1949, the year the series and, therefore, wrote their own. first of his four daughters was born, the National 304 Ray Bradbury Fantasy Fan Federation selected him best author of mated short film, Icarus Montgolfier Wright, was the year. nominated for an Academy Award in 1962. Bradbury’s career continued to advance and After 1980, Bradbury collected some of his early then to diversify after 1949. The Martian Chronicles detective stories in A Memory of Murder (1984) and (1950) became one of the first science-fiction then published a detective novel, Death Is a Lonely works to receive serious attention from the main- Business (1985), and a gothic thriller set in Holly- stream literary establishment when reviewer Chris- wood, A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990). In 1985, he topher Isherwood praised it highly. (In 1977-1978, began a series of adaptations of his own stories for a the play version would receive five Los Angeles cable television series, The Ray Bradbury Television Drama Critics Circle Awards.) Then followed a pat- Theater. His awards include a life achievement tern of publishing collections of stories inter- award from the World Fantasy Convention (1977), spersed with new novels and other activities that in- a Gandalf “Grand Master” award at the Hugo cluded screenplays, musical theater, drama, and Award Ceremonies of 1980, the Jules Verne Award poetry. His best-known fiction appeared before (1984), the PEN Body of Work Award (1985), a Star 1963: The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (2002), and the Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes National Medal of the Arts (2004). His wife of fifty- (1962), and five collections of short stories. Each of six years, Marguerite, died in 2003, survived by the novels either grew from earlier published sto- Bradbury and their four daughters. ries or was constructed of earlier stories worked to- Bradbury’s achievements are mainly in fantasy gether into a longer work. During this period, he and science fiction. His drama and film scripts also traveled to Ireland, where he worked on the have been well received, but his poetry has not. screenplay for director John Huston’s 1956 film Continuing attention from literary scholars and version of Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby cultural historians suggests that he will surely be re- Dick (1851). membered for the powerful and thoughtful story- After 1963, Bradbury continued to publish telling that brought him to prominence in the short-story collections, but he devoted more of his 1950’s. Bradbury’s achievement opened a genera- energy to other areas, especially drama. His first tion’s hearts and minds to the worlds of imagina- collection of short plays, The Anthem Sprinters and tion and wonder in fantasy and science fiction, Other Antics (1963), grew out of his six months in beginning an era of wide popularity for and of Ireland. He produced two shows based on his own scholarly interest in genres that had been on the works: The World of Ray Bradbury (1964) and The fringe of modern culture. Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1965). His other works in the 1960’s included a cantata and a film his- Analysis tory of America for the 1964 New York World’s Literary critic David Mogen has characterized Fair. Though his interests in fiction and drama well the central motif of Ray Bradbury’s fiction: joy- continued into the 1970’s, he also turned his at- ous absorption in the experience of living. In each tention more decisively toward poetry, publishing of his major works, this joy in living plays a crucial three volumes and then collecting them into a sin- role. Mogen sees this attitude in Bradbury’s own gle volume, The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury life—in his prolific career with its many directions (1982). During this period, he wrote much non- and in his nonfiction accounts of his life and ca- fiction prose for magazines ranging from Life to reer. One could guess this about Bradbury merely Playboy. by looking at his book titles, not only those that rec- Film productions of Bradbury’s works include ommend enthusiastic exploration or offer medi- Fahrenheit 451 (1966), The Illustrated Man (1969), cines for melancholy but also those that are drawn The Martian Chronicles (1980), and Something Wicked from visionary poets such as Walt Whitman and This Way Comes (1984). Of these adaptations, only William Butler Yeats. French filmmaker François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit The dominant thematic note in Bradbury’s fic- 451 was widely praised by film critics. Many of tion is a kind of hopefulness for humanity. Mogen Bradbury’s short stories have been adapted for and another critic, Gary K. Wolfe, have noted that television, some with great success. His own ani- Bradbury’s optimism has roots in two major West- 305 Ray Bradbury ern myths that have been important to many Amer- less electronic stimuli and censoring all the great ican writers: the frontier and the Garden of Eden. ideas and great books in the history of civilization. For Bradbury, the stars are the new frontier, hu- While such a society believes that it is escaping manity’s next field of exploration and expansion. death somehow, it is in fact running directly toward The stars also become a new Eden, an extension of death in the form of a military holocaust. The two the hope for new beginnings that idealistic explor- major Green Town novels, Dandelion Wine and ers saw in America and that F. Scott Fitzgerald so el- Something Wicked This Way Comes, show individuals oquently captured in his description of the “fresh, facing death and the temptation to grasp evil green breast of the new world” at the end of a novel power to evade death. Bradbury admired, The Great Gatsby (1925). Bradbury’s works show his optimistic faith in a Mogen sums up Bradbury’s hopefulness by de- fulfilling human destiny in some future time and scribing him as a visionary “who believes the hu- place, and they also show his understanding of the man race will conquer death through spiritual re- barriers that humanity must overcome on its jour- birth in unearthly new frontiers.” Bradbury’s ney to this destiny and of the human limitations readers are aware of the dark elements in his fic- people are likely to carry with them into any future. tion, however: the tales of terror collected in The October Country, the threatening ravine that cuts through Green Town, and the technological dysto- pias (of which Fahrenheit 451 is the main example).
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