Bradbury, Ray, 1920-
 

official site

Biography
         from spaceagecity.com  (see below)

Ray Bradbury: On top of the world (from CNN.com) (see below)
 

Bradbury Scrapbook (by Vadim Gordin)

Fahrenheirt 451 (Burn the book!)

Playboy Interview: Ray Bradbury
May 1996, p.47+

Links

 
 

BIOGRAPHY
by Chris Jepsen & Richard Johnston

.
Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on August 22, 1920.

He was the third son of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury. They gave him the middle name "Douglas," after the actor, Douglas Fairbanks.
 
He never lived up to his namesake's reputation for swashbuckling adventure on the high seas. Instead, Bradbury's great adventures would take place behind a typewriter, in the realm of imagination. Today, as an author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, lecturer, poet and visionary, Ray Bradbury is known as one of America's greatest creative geniuses.
 
Bradbury's early childhood in Waukegan was characterized by his loving extended family. These formative years provided the foundations for both the author and his stories.
 
In Bradbury's works of fiction, 1920s Waukegan becomes "Greentown," Illinois. Greentown is a symbol of safety and home, and often provides a contrasting backdrop to tales of fantasy or menace. In Greentown, Bradbury's favorite uncle sprouts wings, traveling carnivals conceal supernatural powers, and his grandparents provide room and board to Charles Dickens.
 
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.
 
In 1934, the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California. As a teenager, Bradbury often roller-skated through Hollywood, trying to spot celebrities. He befriended other talented and creative people, like special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen and radio star George Burns.
 
In fact, it was Burns who gave Bradbury his first pay as a writer -- for contributing a joke to the Burns & Allen Show.
 
Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School. He was active in the drama club and planned to become an actor.

However, two of his teachers recognized a greater talent in Bradbury, and encouraged his development as a writer. Snow Longley Housh taught him about poetry and Jeannet Johnson taught him to write short stories. Over 60 years later, Bradbury's work bears the indelible impressions left by these two women.

As his high school years progressed, Bradbury grew serious about becoming a writer. Outside of class, he contributed to fan publications and joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction League. At school, he improved his grades and joined the Poetry Club.
 
Bradbury's formal education ended with his high school graduation in 1938. However, he continued to educate himself. He sold newspapers on Los Angeles street corners all day, but spent his nights in the library. The hours between newspaper editions were spent at his 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.
 
As he honed his writing skills, Bradbury often looked to established writers for guidance. During those early years, his mentors included Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett, Robert Heinlein and Henry Hasse.
 
At last, in 1942, Bradbury wrote "The Lake" -- the story in which he discovered his distinctive writing style. The following year, he gave up selling newspapers and began to write full-time. In 1945 his short story "The Big Black and White Game" was selected for Best American Short Stories.
 
In 1946, he met his future wife, Marguerite "Maggie" McClure. Maggie, a graduate of George Washington High School (1941) and UCLA, 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. Ray Harryhausen served as the best man.
 
That same year also marked the publication of Bradbury's first collection of short stories, entitled Dark Carnival.
 
The first of the Bradbury's four daughters, Susan, was born in 1949. Susan's sisters, Ramona, Bettina and Alexandra were born in 1951, 1955 and 1958, respectively.
 
Bradbury's reputation as a leading science fiction writer was finally established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950. The book describes man's attempt to colonize Mars, the effects of colonization on the Martians, and the colonists' reaction to a massive nuclear war on Earth.
 
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.

Another of Bradbury's best-known works, Fahrenheit 451, was released in 1953. It is set in a future in which a totalitarian government has banned the written word. Montag enjoys his job as a professional book-burner. But he begins to question his duties the when he learns of a time when books were legal and people did not live in fear. Montag begins stealing books marked for destruction and meets a professor who agrees to educate him. When his pilfering is discovered, he must run for his life.

Bradbury's work has won innumerable honors and awards, including the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award (1954), the Aviation-Space Writer's Association Award for Best Space Article in an American Magazine (1967), the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. His work was also included in the Best American Short Stories collections for 1946, 1948 and 1952.

Perhaps Bradbury's most unusual honor came from the Apollo astronaut who named Dandelion Crater after Bradbury's novel, Dandelion Wine.
 
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
 
Over the decades, there have also been many attempts to adapt Bradbury's stories for television. Commendable examples include episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Bradbury's Emmy-winning teleplay for The Halloween Tree.

But not all adaptations were so successful. For instance, Bradbury was seriously disappointed with a Martian Chronicles network miniseries, broadcast in 1979.
 
Looking for more creative control, Bradbury turned to the relative freedom of cable television and developed his own series. Ray Bradbury Theater ran from 1986 until 1992 and allowed the author to produce televised versions of his own stories.

Even while working on TV series, novels, short stories, screenplays and radio dramas, Bradbury continues to publish collections of his plays, poems and essays.

What does he do for an encore, you ask?

Beyond his literary contributions, Bradbury also serves as an "idea consultant" for various civic, educational and entertainment projects. He provided the concept and script for the United States Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair and contributed to Disney's Spaceship Earth at EPCOT and the Orbitron at the Disneyland parks in Paris and Anaheim.

As a creative consultant to the Jon Jerde Partnership, he also helped create trend-setting shopping/entertainment plazas, including the Glendale Galleria in Los Angeles and Horton Plaza in San Diego. These innovative malls (and their many imitators) reflect Bradbury's vision of a "small-town plaza" tailored to the urban environment.

Today, Ray and Maggie Bradbury continue to live in Los Angeles. They have eight grandchildren and four cats.

Ray Bradbury still writes daily and occasionally lectures. At an age when most men rest on their laurels, Bradbury remains a dynamic storyteller and contributor of "obvious answers to impossible futures.".

  
 
 

January 23, 2002 Posted: 9:47 AM EST (1447 GMT)

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- He is 81 now and, slowed by a stroke, sometimes uses a wheelchair to navigate the nooks and crannies of Los Angeles, the adopted hometown Ray Bradbury fell in love with on the day actress Jean Harlow gave him a kiss.

But put him behind a typewriter and the grand old man of science-fiction still pumps out the pages without missing a beat.

He has a new novel in bookstores, "From the Dust Returned," and jokes that it only took him 55 years to complete. A volume of poetry, "They Have Not Seen the Stars," is recently released. And he's writing "Falling Upward," a play based on the time he spent in Ireland in the mid-1950s writing the screenplay for the movie version of "Moby-Dick."

"Then I'm doing a new version of 'The Illustrated Man' for Columbia-Tristar and a film version of my story, 'Sound of Thunder,' that will be filmed by Pierce Brosnan," says Bradbury, sounding as bright and sunny as the weather on this 80-degree fall day.

Having labored in relative obscurity in recent years, the author of more than 30 books was recently declared the hottest writer in Hollywood by Salon magazine and awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

And, to top it all off, there are plans for a second movie version of his classic science-fiction novel, "Fahrenheit 451," with Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption") directing.

"I've lived long enough! I've stuck around and waited," the white-haired, bespectacled author declares jovially in a stentorian voice as he explains his current run of good luck.

"A lot of this is due to the fact that my books have moved into our school system. Starting about 25-30 years ago, the children brought my books into the schools and to the teachers -- a very unusual situation in education.

 
Director Frank Darabont is making Bradbury's classic "Fahrenheit 451" into a movie.
"So now you've got a whole new generation ... who read me in school 20-30 years ago. It's only natural they'd pay attention to me now that they're older."

Images of childhood, metaphors of life
Many of Bradbury's books seem at first glance tailor-made for readers on the cusp of puberty. What 14-year-old, fresh, from "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn," can resist "Something Wicked This Way Comes," with its affectionate remembrances of touring summer tent shows and their mysterious, scary carnival barkers?

But a closer reading will show that "Something Wicked" is not really a sci-fi book about a spooky old carnival run by people who never die. It's a metaphor for a universal human fear -- not the fear of dying, but of growing old and being forgotten. Or, in the case of children, never growing old enough to be taken seriously.

"It seems to me that he possesses a remarkable gift of facing what is dark in the human spirit and at the same time never really losing faith that individual small people can struggle through to some kind of affirmation," says Katherine Hayles, a professor of the University of California at Los Angeles who specializes in the study of science fiction.

"There are always people in his books who are willing to fight against the forces of evil and try to do the right thing. I think 'Fahrenheit 451' is an example."

Bradbury's masterpiece portrays an ugly, futuristic society where firefighters burn homes to keep people from reading the books inside. One firefighter, though, can't resist picking up a book, reading it and then standing up against the evil of which he was once a part.

Named for the flash point of paper, "Fahrenheit 451" has been credited with inspiring everything from the invention of Walkman radios and CD players (they were called seashell radios in the book) to foreseeing such an infatuation with television that it would lead to wall-sized, stereophonic sets and a society that would drop whatever it was doing to watch another police chase on them.

He wrote the book in nine days in 1950. Bradbury, who couldn't afford a private office and never learned to drive, would walk, roller-skate or bicycle from his home to the UCLA library. There, he would pound out his manuscript on typewriters that rented for 10 cents a half-hour, calculating that he invested 98 dimes in the process.

 
Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" was made into a 1969 movie starring Rod Steiger.
"But that was very unusual," he now laughs, adding that no other book came to him that easily. "From the Dust Returned," he insists, took more than a half-century.

"Some years I wrote one chapter, other years I wrote five," he recalls. "I'm not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work."

Embracing L.A.
Set on Halloween in an old gothic house on the edge of a small Midwestern town, "From the Dust" brings together a friendly, if eccentric, family of old ghosts and the young mortal boy who befriends them. It was drawn in part from his experiences in Waukegan, Illinois, where he lived until the Depression drove his family to Los Angeles in search of work.

"I had a wonderful Aunt Neva who raised me far more than my family, you might say. And she loved Halloween. So every Halloween we went out into the country and bought pumpkins and corn shafts and did my parents' house over, and it became a Halloween gothic house. And then she made me up as a witch and hid me in the attic, where I was supposed to scare people."

But if "From the Dust" and other novels evoke pleasant memories of early life in the Midwest, their creator was no less quick to embrace Los Angeles.

"I hung around the studios and had my picture taken with Marlene Dietrich, which was really something for a 14-year-old," he recalls fondly. "And I got a kiss on the cheek from Jean Harlow. It's still burning there, all these years later."

He was still hanging around those studios a few years later when he met Forrest J. Ackerman, bit-part actor, sometime literary agent and founder of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" magazine.

A patron to any number of young, local science-fiction writers, Ackerman is credited with coining the term "Sci-Fi." He edited some of Bradbury's early stories and bankrolled one of his first publishing efforts, the small fantasy magazine "Futuria Fantasia." The two remain fast friends, and Bradbury says he helped launch his career, though Ackerman insists the writer needed little help.

"I saw an incredibly enthusiastic youngster who would go around to the radio stations, talk his way in and when the actors were about to go on the air live, hand them four or five jokes he'd written and, if they used any of them, try to get them to pay him," Ackerman, now 85, recalls.

'I write fantasy'
But despite his acclaim as a science-fiction writer, Bradbury shuns the title.

"I write fantasy," he says. "I've only written one science-fiction book, 'Fahrenheit 451.' That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books. But all my other work is fantastic. It doesn't exist."

Even "The Martian Chronicles," he notes, takes place on a planet with people and an atmosphere similar to Earth's.

It also contains the requisite Bradbury metaphors, including those examining persecution and racism. Among the people who migrate to Mars are blacks from the South, their mass exodus confounding their white employers, who can't understand why they weren't satisfied with being given the right to vote.

Such broad themes, Hayles says, place Bradbury's work closer to mainstream literature than science fiction.

"Stylistically, he's a classic writer," the UCLA professor says. "He goes for the realistic narrative. No matter how fantastic the events get, the narration itself is usually pretty straight forward."

The result, she believes, is that his best work will live on long after his passing.

Not that the author is in any hurry to go. He still spends part of each day writing in the basement of the home in which he's lived for decades, in a quiet middle-class neighborhood of rolling hills a couple miles (a few kilometers) from the Pacific Ocean.

He's lived long enough to see such things as interactive computers, giant TVs and even a limited version of the space travel he envisioned.

But he wants seedy Hollywood restored to its glory days, when a wide-eyed adolescent hanging out in search of movie stars could actually be kissed by one.

And he has high hopes that public education will be turned around over the next few years, adding that after a time in which society spurned reading in favor of what he views as wasted time with video games, the public is getting back on track.

"We've got to do the job from the inside," he says, proposing that everyone be taught to read beginning in kindergarten.

"If we don't," he adds, "we're just going to raise another generation of morons. And we can't afford that, can we?"

Copyright 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
 
 
 

xx Bradbury, Ray, 1920-
xx Sci-fi