A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Ray Douglas Bradbury novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, is an american fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer known best for The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 book which has been described both as a short story collection and a novel, and his 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He was the third son of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury. His grandfather and great-grandfather were newspaper publishers, and not surprisingly, Bradbury was a reader and writer throughout his youth, spending much time in the Carnegie Library in Waukegan. They gave him the middle name "Douglas," after the actor, Douglas Fairbanks. Between 1926 and 1933, the Bradbury family moved back and forth between Waukegan and Tucson, Arizona. In 1931, young Ray began writing his own stories on butcher paper. His two early books Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes depict the town of Waukegan as "Green Town" and are semi-autobiographical. In 1934, the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California. Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School. He was active in the drama club and planned to become an actor. Bradbury graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938 but chose not to attend college. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. His first published short story was "Hollerbochen's Dilemma," printed in 1938 in Imagination!, an amateur fan magazine. In 1939, Bradbury published four issues of his own fan magazine, Futuria Fantasia, writing much of the content himself. His first paid publication, a short story titled "Pendulum," appeared in Super Science Stories in 1941. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947. In 1945 his short story "The Big Black and White Game" was selected for Best American Short Stories. That same year, Bradbury traveled through Mexico to collect Indian masks for the Los Angeles County Museum. In 1946, he met his future wife, Marguerite "Maggie" McClure. A graduate of George Washington High School (1941) and UCLA, Maggie was working as a clerk in a book shop when they met. Ray and Maggie were married in the Church of the Good Shepherd, Episcopal in Los Angeles on September 27, 1947. They have four daughters and eight grandchildren. The first of the Bradbury's four daughters, Susan, was born in 1949. Susan's sisters, Ramona, Betitbusna and Alexandra were born in 1951, 1955 and 1958, respectively. Sadly, Maggie passed away in November of 2003. His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended consequences. As much a work of social criticism as of science fiction, The Martian Chronicles reflects America's anxieties in the early 1950's: the threat of nuclear war, the longing for a simpler life, reactions against racism and censorship, and the fear of foreign political powers. Next came The Illustrated Man and then, in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, which many consider to be Bradbury's masterpiece, a scathing indictment of censorship set in a future world where the written word is forbidden. In an attempt to salvage their history and culture, a group of rebels memorize entire works of literature and philosophy as their books are burned by the totalitarian state. Other works include The October Country, A Medicine for Melancholy, I Sing the Body Electric!, Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. In all, Ray Bradbury has published more than thirty books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, and plays. His short stories have appeared in more than 1,000 school curriculum "recommended reading" anthologies. From the Dust Returned has been published by William Morrow at Halloween 2001. Morrow released One More For the Road, a new collection Bradbury stories, at Christmas 2001. Ray Bradbury's work has been included in four Best American Short Story collections. He has been awarded the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, the PEN Center USA West Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. In November 2000, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was conferred upon Mr. Bradbury at the 2000 National Book Awards Ceremony in New York City. Perhaps Bradbury's most unusual honor came from the Apollo astronaut who named Dandelion Crater after Bradbury's novel, Dandelion Wine. He has never confined his vision to the purely literary. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's Ray Bradbury Theater. Commendable examples include episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Bradbury's Emmy-winning teleplay for The Halloween Tree. He was the creative consultant on the United States Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. In 1982 he created the interior metaphors for the Spaceship Earth display at Epcot Center, Disney World, and later contributed to the conception of the Orbitron space ride at Euro-Disney, France. Bradbury's lifetime love of cinema fuelled his involvement in many Hollywood productions, including The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (a version of his story, "The Fog Horn"), Something Wicked This Way Comes (based on his novel,) and director John Huston's version of Moby Dick. His animated film about the history of flight, Icarus Montgolfier Wright, was nominated for an academy award. On the occasion of his 80th birthday in August 2000, Bradbury said, "The great fun in my life has been getitbusng up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me. The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was twelve. In any event, here I am, eighty years old, feeling no different, full of a great sense of joy, and glad for the long life that has been allowed me. I have good plans for the next ten or twenty years, and I hope you''ll come along." |
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