| The Martian Chronicles … Dandelion
Wine … Something Wicked This Way Comes …
Fahrenheit 451.
Works that touched our hearts … our souls … and
fired our imaginations. Works that came from the fertile imagination
and prolific pen of one of the most celebrated writers of
our time:
Ray Bradbury.
I don't remember how old I was when I discovered Bradbury.
I do remember the book:
The Martian Chronicles. Those stories – rich,
poetic, poignant – transformed me into a lifelong admirer
of the man. I can still, to this day, recall many of those
stories, though it's been years since I read them.
Born on August 22, 1922 in Waukegan, Illinois, the eldest
son of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a lineman for power and
telephone utilities, and Ester Moberg Bradbury, a Swedish
immigrant. Bradbury rejected being categorized as an author
of science fiction.
“I don't write science fiction,” he once said.
“Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy
is a depiction of the unreal.”
On another occasion, he said, “I don't try to describe
the future. I try to prevent it.”
Bradbury spent more than 70 years – until his death
on June 5 in Los Angeles at age 91 – trying to “prevent”
the future, a career that included not only hundreds of short
stories and nearly 50 books but poems, essays, operas, plays,
teleplays and screenplays.
He wrote the screenplay for John Huston's classic film adaptation
of Moby Dick – which earned him a nomination
for an Academy Award.
He adapted 65 of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury
Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The
Halloween Tree.
His awards included the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal
for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004
National Medal of Arts and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special
Citation.
As a child, Bradbury reportedly was a huge fan of magicians
and a voracious reader of adventure and fantasy fiction –
especially L. Frank Baum, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
His family moved to Los Angeles in 1934, and Bradbury graduated
from high school there in 1938. Unable to afford college,
he later said he went to the local library instead. “I
couldn't go to college,” he said, “so I went to
the library three days a week for 10 years.”
To support himself while he wrote, Bradbury sold newspapers.
He published his first short story in a fan magazine in 1938,
then a year later, published four issues of his own fan magazine
– Futuria Fantasia – writing nearly every
piece himself and using a variety of pseudonyms to hide that
fact.
He sold his first professional piece, a story called “Pendulum,”
in November 1941 – the month before Pearl Harbor propelled
the United States into World War II. Vision problems rendered
him unfit for military service. Bradbury became a full-time
writer by early 1943, and his first collection of short stories,
Dark Carnival, was published in 1947.
Throughout his life, Bradbury reportedly liked to recount
the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in
1932. At the end of his performance, Bradbury said, the magician
touched him with a sword and commanded, “Live forever!”
“I decided,” Bradbury later said, “that
was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing
every day.”
The magician's command has come to pass. Ray Bradbury will
live forever in his creations.
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