Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter, and one of the most celebrated American writers of the 20th century. He worked across fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction, often bringing wonder, dread, humor, and human feeling into the same story. The New York Times called him the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream, praising his fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character.

Bradbury is best known for the novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and for the short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). His other notable books include the coming-of-age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote poetry, including work published in They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001), and wrote or consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted for television, film, and comic books.

He was born in Waukegan, Illinois, to Esther Moberg Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant, and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a power and telephone lineman of English ancestry. His middle name, Douglas, came from actor Douglas Fairbanks. Bradbury’s early childhood in Waukegan left a strong mark on his fiction. He grew up near grandparents who lived next door, and an aunt read him short stories. In his imagination, 1920s Waukegan became Green Town, Illinois, a recurring setting in his work.

The Bradbury family spent periods in Tucson, Arizona, before settling in Los Angeles in 1934, when he was 14. They arrived with only $40, enough for rent and food until his father found work making wire at a cable company. Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School and joined the drama club. He roller-skated through Hollywood hoping to meet celebrities, and among the creative people he met were special-effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen and radio star George Burns. His first pay as a writer came at 14, when he sold a joke to Burns for use on the Burns and Allen radio show.

Bradbury’s imagination was fed by libraries, comics, radio, films, and carnivals. As a boy he spent hours in the Carnegie Library in Waukegan reading H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe. He began writing stories at age 12, sometimes on butcher paper, and later said he imitated Poe until about 18. He loved Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars books, collected Tarzan and Buck Rogers comics, wrote about Tarzan, drew his own Sunday panels, and copied the radio show Chandu the Magician from memory after each broadcast.

A carnival memory also stayed with him. At 12, Bradbury saw a performer called Mr. Electrico, who touched him with an electrified sword and cried, “Live, forever!” Bradbury later said that within days he began to write and never stopped. As a teenager he found the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, and he later met writers including Bob Olsen and Robert A. Heinlein. Bradbury’s words still matter because they come from that mix of reading, spectacle, fear, play, and moral curiosity: the mind of a writer who treated imagination not as escape, but as a way to see people more clearly.