Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, United States to Esther (née Moberg) Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant, and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a power and telephone lineman of English descent. He was given the middle name "Douglas," after the actor Douglas Fairbanks.
Bradbury graduated from Los Angeles High School, where he took poetry and short story writing courses that furthered his interest in writing, but he did not attend college. Instead, he sold newspapers at the corner of South Norton Avenue and Olympic Boulevard.
Bradbury held honorary doctorates of Woodbury University (2003), the National University of Ireland, Galway (2005; Doctor of Laws) and Columbia College Chicago (2009).
Bradbury began his career during the 1940s as a writer for such pulp magazines as Black Mask, Amazing Stories, and Weird Tales. The latter magazine served to showcase the works of such fantasy writers as H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and August Derleth. Derleth, who founded Arkham House, a publishing company specializing in fantasy literature, accepted one of Bradbury's stories for Who Knocks?, an anthology published by his firm. Derleth subsequently suggested that Bradbury compile a volume of his own stories; the resulting book, Dark Carnival (1947), collects Bradbury's early fantasy tales. Although Bradbury rarely published pure fantasy later in his career, such themes of his future work as the need to retain humanistic values and the importance of the imagination are displayed in the stories of this collection. Many of these pieces were republished with new material in The October Country (1955).
The publication of The Martian Chronicles (1950) established Bradbury's reputation as an author of sophisticated science fiction. This collection of stories is connected by the framing device of the settling of Mars by human beings and is dominated by tales of space travel and environmental adaptation. Bradbury's themes, however, reflect many of the important issues of the post-World War II era-racism, censorship, technology, and nuclear war-and the stories delineate the implications of these themes through authorial commentary. Clifton Fadiman described The Martian Chronicles as being "as grave and troubling as one of Hawthorne's allegories." Another significant collection of short stories, The Illustrated Man (1951), also uses a framing device, basing the stories on the tattoos of the title character.
Bradbury's later short story collections are generally considered to be less significant than The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Bradbury shifted his focus in these volumes from outer space to more familiar earthbound settings. Dandelion Wine (1957), for example, has as its main subject the midwestern youth of Bradbury's semiautobiographical protagonist, Douglas Spaulding. Although Bradbury used many of the same techniques in these stories as in his science fiction and fantasy publications, Dandelion Wine was not as well received as his earlier work.
Other later collections, including A Medicine for Melancholy (1959), The Machineries of Joy (1964), I Sing the Body Electric! (1969), and Long after Midnight (1976), contain stories set in Bradbury's familiar outer space or mid-western settings and explore his typical themes. Many of Bradbury's stories have been anthologized or filmed for such television programs as The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Ray Bradbury Theater.
In addition to his short fiction, Bradbury has several adult novels. The first of these, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), originally published as a short story and later expanded into novel form, concerns a future society in which books are burned because they are perceived as threats to societal conformity. In Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) a father attempts to save his son and a friend from the sinister forces of a mysterious traveling carnival. Both of these novels have been adapted for film. The next year, he published his first collection of short plays, The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics.
Death Is a Lonely Business (1985) is a detective story featuring Douglas Spaulding, the protagonist of Dandelion Wine, as a struggling writer for pulp magazines Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles are often included in the category of novel. Bradbury has also written poetry and drama; critics have faulted his efforts in these genres as lacking the impact of his fiction. Two sequels, A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990) and Let’s All Kill Constance (2002), mined his experiences in 1950s and ’60s Hollywood.
In 1954 Bradbury spent six months in Ireland with director John Huston working on the screenplay for the film Moby Dick (1956), an experience Bradbury later fictionalized in his novel Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). After the release of Moby Dick, Bradbury was in demand as a screenwriter in Hollywood and wrote scripts for Playhouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Twilight Zone.
His final novel, Farewell Summer (2006), was a sequel to Dandelion Wine. He adapted 59 of his short stories for the television series The Ray Bradbury Theatre (1985–92).
During his life Bradbury created more than eight hundred different novels, hundreds of short stories, dozens of plays, a number of articles, notes and poems. His story became the basis of several screenings, theater, and musical compositions.
His widely known works are his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), his science fiction and horror story collections, The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and I Sing the Body Electric (1969).
Bradbury was a recipient of numerous awards, including the Prometheus Award for Fahrenheit 451 in 1984, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award and an Emmy Award for the screenplay The Halloween Tree in 1994, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2000, the National Medal of Arts on November 17, 2004, Sir Arthur Clarke Award in 2007 and a 2007 Pulitzer Citation. The same year, Bradbury received the French Commandeur Ordre des Arts et des Lettres medal. In 2008, he was named SFPA Grandmaster and received the inaugural J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction, presented by the UCR Libraries at the 2008 Eaton Science Fiction Conference, "Chronicling Mars". In 2010, Spike TV Scream Awards Comic-Con Icon Award went to Bradbury.
Bradbury also received a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement at the 1977 World Fantasy Convention and was named Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy at the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention. In 1989 the Horror Writers Association gave him the fourth or fifth Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in horror fiction and the Science Fiction Writers of America made him its 10th SFWA Grand Master. He won a First Fandom Hall of Fame Award in 1996 and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 1999, its fourth class of two deceased and two living writers. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Bradbury was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on April 1, 2002.
(A true master tells all, revealing the strange secret of ...)
1996(In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, America’s preemi...)
1950(When the carnival comes to town, two boys unearth the ter...)
1962(A lonely little boy who is scared of the dark sits in his...)
1955Bradbury drew from many, if not all, of the world's religions. He once vaguely identified as a Buddhist, but would probably be more accurately described as intensely spiritual.
Bradbury favored small, or close to non-existent, government. He favored George W. Bush over Bill Clinton, indicating an affinity to the right. He was a major supporter of public libraries and feared the "technological revolution."
In a genre in which futurism and the fantastic are usually synonymous, Bradbury stands out for his celebration of the future in realistic terms and his exploration of conventional values and ideas. As one of the first science fiction writers to convey his themes through a refined prose style replete with subtlety and humanistic analogies, Bradbury has helped make science fiction a more respected literary genre and is widely admired by the literary establishment.
Ray Bradbury's science fiction, unlike that of many of his colleagues, de-emphasizes the Buck Rogers-Flash Gordon variety of space hardware and gadgetry in favor of an exploration of the impact of scientific development on human lives. In general, he warns man against becoming too dependent on science and technology at the expense of moral and aesthetic concerns, contending that his stories "are intended as much to instruct how to prevent dooms, as to predict them."
The Martian Chronicles, a lyrical and basically optimistic account of man's colonization of Mars, is widely regarded as Bradbury's most outstanding work. It blends many of his major themes and metaphors, including the conflict between individual and social concerns (that is, freedom versus confinement and conformity) and the idea of space as a frontier wilderness, a place where man sets out on a quasi-religious quest of self-discovery and spiritual renewal. In addition, The Martian Chronicles provides the author with an opportunity to explore what he perceives to be the often deadly attraction of the past as opposed to the future and of balance and stability versus change.
As in many other Bradbury stories, this idea is expressed in The Martian Chronicles via the metaphor of the small, old-fashioned midwestern town ("Green Town, Illinois") which represents peaceful childhood memories of a world that man hesitates to abandon to the passage of time. Russell Kirk feels that the greatest strength of The Martian Chronicles is its ability to make us look closely at ourselves.
Quotations:
"Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off."
"I believe the universe created us — we are an audience for miracles."
"At the center of religion is love. I love you and I forgive you. I am like you and you are like me. I love all people. I love the world. I love creating. Everything in our life should be based on love."
"I use a scientific idea as a platform to leap into the air and never come back."
"I write for fun. You can't get too serious. I don't pontificate in my work. I have fun with ideas. I play with them. I approach my craft with enthusiasm and respect. If my work sparks serious thought, fine. But I don't write with that in mind. I'm not a serious person, and I don't like serious people. I don't see myself as a philosopher. That's awfully boring. I want to shun that role. My goal is to entertain myself and others. Hopefully, that will prevent me from taking myself too seriously."
"I've found inspiration for many of my short stories in other people's poetry.... There have been many times when I've taken a single line of poetry and turned it into a short story. Poetry is an old love of mine, one which is central to my life."
Bradbury became Science Fiction Poetry Association Grandmaster in 2008.
While Bradbury's popularity is acknowledged even by his detractors, many critics find the reasons for his success difficult to pinpoint. Some believe that the tension Bradbury creates between fantasy and reality is central to his ability to convey his visions and interests to his readers. Peter Stoler asserted that Bradbury's reputation rests on his "chillingly understated stories about a familiar world where it is always a few minutes before midnight on Halloween, and where the unspeakable and unthinkable become commonplace."
"If you're too good a scientist, you're not a good writer," Ray Bradbury once told an interviewer. This quote summarizes his unorthodox approach to writing science fiction, an approach which has led some critics to insist that calling him "the world's greatest living science fiction writer" (a phrase which appears on the covers of the paperback editions of his books) does an injustice to the scope of his talent.
Bradbury managed to create a tremendous amount of work in several genres, including short stories, plays, novels, film scripts, poems, children's books, and nonfiction. He attributed this prolific production to a steady writing routine. "Every single day for 50 years," he told Aljean Harmetz in the New York Times, "if I can get to my typewriter by 9 o'clock, by 10:30 I'm protected against the world."
An incredible memory also helped. Bradbury claimed total recall of every book he had read and of every film he had seen. This enabled him to "cross-pollinate metaphors," as he once said, from hundreds of sources for his own fiction. He also utilized a spontaneous writing technique similar to the automatic writing of the surrealists. William F. Touponce in Extrapolation quotes Bradbury explaining: "In my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head." As Touponce relates, Bradbury "advises the aspiring writer to relax and concentrate on the unconscious message. This way of writing shorts out the mind's critical and categorizing activities, allowing the subconscious to speak."
In his essay for Voices for the Future, Willis E. McNelly concludes that Bradbury's works, especially The Martian Chronicles and the highly-acclaimed Fahrenheit 451, prove that "quality writing is possible in [a] much-maligned genre. Bradbury is obviously a careful craftsman, an ardent wordsmith whose attention to the niceties of language and its poetic cadences would have marked him as significant even if he had never written a word about Mars." In short, McNelly continues, Bradbury's "themes ... place him squarely in the middle of the mainstream of American life and tradition. His eyes are set firmly on the horizon-frontier where dream fathers mission and action mirrors illusion. And if Bradbury's eyes lift from the horizon to the stars, the act is merely an extension of the vision all Americans share. His voice is that of the poet raised against the mechanization of mankind."
Though he is most often called a science fiction writer, Bradbury considered himself to be an "idea writer" instead. "Everything of mine is permeated with my love of ideas-both big and small. It doesn't matter what it is as long as it grabs me and holds me, fascinates me. And then I'll run out and do something about it."
Quotes from others about the person
Mary Ross: "Perhaps the special quality of [Bradbury's] fantasy lies in the fact that people to whom amazing things happen are often so simply, often touchingly, like ourselves."
George Edgar Slusser: "to Bradbury, science is the forbidden fruit, destroyer of Eden.... In like manner, Bradbury is a fantasist whose fantasies are oddly circumscribed: he writes less about strange things happening to people than about strange imaginings of the human mind. Corresponding, then, to an outer labyrinth of modern technological society is this inner one-fallen beings feeding in isolation on their hopeless dreams."
Damon Knight: "The purists are right in saying that [Bradbury] does not write science fiction, and never has."
Donald A. Wollheim: "Only a very small percentage of Bradbury's works can be classified as science fiction. Although his most 'science-fictional' book, The Martian Chronicles, is a classic, its s-f plausibility is slight.... It has the form of science fiction but in content there is no effort to implement the factual backgrounds. His Mars bears no relation to the astronomical planet. His stories are stories of people-real and honest and true in their understanding of human nature-but for his purposes the trappings of science fiction are sufficient-mere stage settings.... He is outside the field [of science fiction]-a mainstream fantasist of great brilliance, ... but certainly not the world's greatest living science fiction writer."
Damon Knight: "His imagery is luminous and penetrating, continually lighting up familiar corners with unexpected words. He never lets an idea go until he has squeezed it dry, and never wastes one. As his talent expands, some of his stories become pointed social commentary; some are surprisingly effective religious tracts, disguised as science fiction; others still are nostalgic vignettes; but under it all is still Bradbury the poet of 20th-century neurosis. Bradbury the isolated spark of consciousness, awake and alone at midnight; Bradbury the grown-up child who still remembers, still believes."
A. James Stupple: "Bradbury's point [in The Martian Chronicles] is clear: [The Earthmen] met their deaths because of their inability to forget, or at least resist, the past. Thus, the story of this Third Expedition acts as a metaphor for the book as a whole. Again and again the Earthmen make the fatal mistake of trying to recreate an Earth-like past rather than accept the fact that this is Mars - a different, unique new land in which they must be ready to make personal adjustments."
Russell Kirk: "What gives [The Martian Chronicles] their cunning is ... their portrayal of human nature, in all its baseness and all its promise, against an exquisite stageset. We are shown normality, the permanent things in human nature, by the light of another world; and what we forget about ourselves in the ordinariness of our routine of existence suddenly bursts upon us as a fresh revelation.... Bradbury's stories are not an escape from reality; they are windows looking upon enduring reality."
Bradbury was married to Marguerite McClure from 1947 until her death; they had four daughters: Susan, Ramona, Bettina, and Alexandra.
Leonard Spaulding Bradbury was a lineman for the electric company.
