Author Ray Bradbury signs his new book Bradbury: An Illustrated Life at Barnes & Noble on October 19, 2002 in Los Angeles, California.
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
2002
Ray Bradbury during Ray Bradbury Honored with a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for His Achievements in Film at Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California, United States.
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
2004
13400 Maxella Ave, Marina Del Rey, CA 90292, United States
Ray Bradbury during Ray Bradbury Appearance and Book Signing at Barnes & Noble in Santa Monica, California, United States.
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
2008
"Ray Bradbury's Chrysalis" Comic-Con Panel. July 26, 2008 - San Diego, California.
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
2008
Ray Bradbury poses for a portrait at home in Los Angeles, California on September 22, 2008.
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
2008
Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States
Author Ray Bradbury attends the 13th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA April 26, 2008 in Los Angeles, California.
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
2008
9876 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90210, United States
Ray Bradbury at the 12th Annual Art Directors Guild Awards held at the Beverly Hilton on February 16, 2008 in Beverly Hills, California.
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
2008
Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States
Author Ray Bradbury attends the 13th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA April 26, 2008 in Los Angeles, California.
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
2009
Ray Bradbury
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
2009
Ray Bradbury
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury (R) and Ray Harryhausen
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Ray Bradbury at "Los Angeles Times Festival of Books"
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
Gallery of Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury with Paul Leiva, Seamus Dever, James Cromwell and Jeff Canatta at the Writers Guild of America, West office in Los Angeles for a discussion panel event
Achievements
2009
Author Ray Bradbury attends the 14th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA on April 25, 2009 in Los Angeles, California.
Membership
Awards
National Medal of Arts
2004
Bradbury receiving the National Medal of Arts in 2004 with President George W. Bush and his wife Laura Bush.
Spike TV Scream Awards Comic-Con Icon Award
2010
Ray Bradbury with Comic-Con Icon Award 2010
Sir Arthur Clarke Award
Bradbury was a recipient of the Sir Arthur Clarke Award in 2007.
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
In 2007 Bradbury received the French Commandeur Ordre des Arts et des Lettres medal.
Ray Bradbury during Ray Bradbury Honored with a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for His Achievements in Film at Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California, United States.
Ray Bradbury received honorary degrees from the National University of Ireland, Galway for his Irish roots and significant contribution to the social, cultural, and artistic development of both Ireland and the US.
665 W Jefferson Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90007, United States
Ray Bradbury with The Jules Verne Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Actor Malcolm McDowell at The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles California on December 6, 2007.
Ray Bradbury with Paul Leiva, Seamus Dever, James Cromwell and Jeff Canatta at the Writers Guild of America, West office in Los Angeles for a discussion panel event
(In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, America’s preemi...)
In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, America’s preeminent storyteller, imagines a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor of crystal pillars and fossil seas where a fine dust settles on the great empty cities of a vanished, devastated civilization. Earthmen conquer Mars and then are conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.
(Presents Bradbury's short story about a house whose advan...)
Presents Bradbury's short story about a house whose advanced technology first pleases then increasingly terrifies its occupants, accompanied by questions and exercises about the text.
(Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. For this peerless Amer...)
Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. For this peerless American storyteller, the most bewitching force in the universe is human nature. In these eighteen startling tales unfolding across a canvas of tattooed skin, living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets.
(Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most i...)
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television family. But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
(A lonely little boy who is scared of the dark sits in his...)
A lonely little boy who is scared of the dark sits in his room alone, with only light for company, until a little girl named Dark appears and shows him that light switches don’t just switch off the light they switch on the night. And to switch on the night is to switch on the stars, the moon, the crickets, and the frogs.
(The summer of 28 was a vintage season for a growing boy. ...)
The summer of 28 was a vintage season for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees mowed lawns and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding, remembered forever by the incomparable Ray Bradbury.
(When the carnival comes to town, two boys unearth the ter...)
When the carnival comes to town, two boys unearth the terrifying and horrible secrets that lurk within Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show and learn the consequences of wishes, as a sinister and evil force is at work in Green Town, Illinois.
(In this book, you will meet A Hollywood monster-maker who...)
In this book, you will meet A Hollywood monster-maker whose Tyrannosaurus Rex suddenly becomes alarmingly lifelike. A boy who raises giant mushrooms in his cellar until the mushrooms begin to raise him. A corpse who supports his wife and family. A circus fat lady whose midget husband has tattooed every inch of her mammoth body with fantastically intricate designs.
(Eight costumed boys running to meet their friend Pipkin a...)
Eight costumed boys running to meet their friend Pipkin at the haunted house outside town encounter instead of the huge and cadaverous Mr. Moundshroud. As Pipkin scrambles to join them, he is swept away by a dark Something, and Moundshroud leads the boys on the tail of a kite through time and space to search the past for their friend and the meaning of Halloween.
(Fly to Mars and explore the mysteries of the red planet. ...)
Fly to Mars and explore the mysteries of the red planet. Journey through time to futures ruled by cold computers and hear the deafening roar of dinosaurs in the past. Sing the body electric and look into the mechanical eyes of androids that want to replace human life as we know it.
(Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bun...)
Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling young writer spins fantastic stories from his fertile imagination upon his clacking typewriter. Trying not to miss his girlfriend, the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort, until strange things begin happening around him.
(But from the moment he sets foot on Irish soil, the autho...)
But from the moment he sets foot on Irish soil, the author embarks on an unexpected odyssey. Meet congenial IRA terrorists, tippling men of the cloth impish playwrights, and the boyos at Heeber Finn's pub. In a land where myth is reality, poetry is plentiful, and life's misfortunes are always caused for celebration, Green Shadows, White Whale is the grandest tour of Ireland you'll ever experience with the irrepressible Ray Bradbury as your enthusiastic guide.
(A true master tells all, revealing the strange secret of ...)
A true master tells all, revealing the strange secret of growing young and mad, opening a Witch Door that links two intolerant centuries, joining an ancient couple in their wild assassination games, celebrating life and dreams in the unique voice that has favored him across six decades and has enchanted millions of fans the world over.
(They have lived for centuries in a house of legend and my...)
They have lived for centuries in a house of legend and mystery in upper Illinois and they are not like other midwesterners. Rarely encountered in daylight hours, their children are curious and wild, their old ones have survived since before the Sphinx first sank its paws deep in Egyptian sands. And some sleep in beds with lids.
(On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed w...)
On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. Aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from something she dares not acknowledge and vanishes as suddenly as she appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books, twin listings of the Tinseltown dead and soon to be dead, with Constance's name included among them.
Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
(There is magic in these pages, the wonders of interstella...)
There is magic in these pages, the wonders of interstellar flight, a conspiracy of insects, the early bloom of love in the warmth of August. Both the world of Ray Bradbury and its people are vivid and alive, as colorfully unique as a poker chip hand-painted by a brilliant artist or as warmly familiar as the well-used settings on a family's dining room table.
(The thrilling title story, A Sound of Thunder, tells of a...)
The thrilling title story, A Sound of Thunder, tells of a hunter sent on safari sixty million years in the past. But all it takes is one wrong step in the prehistoric jungle to stamp out the life of a delicate and harmless butterfly and possibly something else much closer to home.
(October 1st, the end of summer. The air is still warm, bu...)
October 1st, the end of summer. The air is still warm, but the fall is in the air. Thirteen-year-old Douglas Spaulding, his younger brother Tom, and their friends do their best to take advantage of these last warm days, rampaging through the ravine, tormenting the girls and declaring war on the old men who run Green Town, IL. For the boys know that Colonel Quartermain and his cohorts want nothing more than to force them to put away their wild ways, to settle down, to grow up. If only, the boys believe, they could stop the clock atop the courthouse building.
(Green Town, Illinois stands at the very heart of Ray Brad...)
Green Town, Illinois stands at the very heart of Ray Bradbury Country. A lovingly re-imagined version of the author's native Waukegan, it has served as the setting for such modern classics as Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Farewell Summer. In Summer Morning, Summer Night, Bradbury returns to this signature locale with a generous new collection of twenty-seven stories and vignettes, seventeen of which have never been published before.
(In Marionettes, Inc., Ray Bradbury offers his devoted rea...)
In Marionettes, Inc., Ray Bradbury offers his devoted readers something both special and unexpected, a unified view of one small corner of a varied fictional universe.
(One of the undisputed classics of modern science fiction,...)
One of the undisputed classics of modern science fiction, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 portrays an increasingly soulless society in which books and ideas have become anathema. Edited by Bradbury authorities Donn Albright and Jon Eller, A Pleasure to Burn is the ideal companion to this cultural benchmark.
Ray Douglas Bradbury, an American author and screenwriter, was among the first authors to combine the concepts of science fiction with a sophisticated prose style. Often described as economical yet poetic, Bradbury's fiction conveys a vivid sense of place in which everyday events are transformed into unusual, sometimes sinister situations.
Background
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.
Education
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).
Bradbury 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.
Politics
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."
Views
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."
Membership
Bradbury became Science Fiction Poetry Association Grandmaster in 2008.
Personality
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."
Connections
Bradbury was married to Marguerite McClure from 1947 until her death; they had four daughters: Susan, Ramona, Bettina, and Alexandra.
Father:
Leonard Spaulding Bradbury
Mother:
Esther Bradbury
Wife:
Marguerite McClure
Daughter:
Alexandra Bradbury
Daughter:
Ramona Bradbury
Daughter:
Bettina Bradbury
Daughter:
Susan Bradbury
mentor:
Bob Olsen
Friend:
Charles Addams
Friend:
Ray Harryhausen
Friend:
William F. Nolan
References
Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion
In each chapter, analysis of the important literary components is given, plot, setting, characters, and themes. In addition, the genesis, critical reception, and an alternate reading of each work is also discussed in clear terms for students and general readers. Suggestions for further reading on Bradbury and his writings are also provided in a select yet extensive bibliography.
2000
Bradbury: Illustrated Life, a Journey to Far Metaphor
A stunning visual biography of one of the nation's greatest writers uses images from television, film, theatre, paintings, photographs, and book illustrations to chronicle the spectacular life and career of the science fiction icon.