SOURCE CITATION
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photo provided by Random House.

"Sidelights"
Ray Bradbury is one of the best-known writers of science fiction, thanks to his numerous short stories, screenplays, and classic books such as The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Ironically, Bradbury does not identify himself as a science fiction writer and has proclaimed his aversion to portions of modern technology: he does not drive a car or own a computer. His fiction reflects this mindset, for unlike many of his colleagues, Bradbury deemphasizes gimmicky space hardware and gadgetry in favor of an exploration of the impact of scientific development on human lives. In general, Bradbury warns man against becoming too dependent on science and technology at the expense of moral and aesthetic concerns. Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, George Edgar Slusser noted that "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."

Bradbury's works have provided a foundation for much of the science fiction written in the twentieth century. James Sallis, in an article for the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, described, "Some artists have a presence so pervasive that we take them wholly for granted; they're the floor we walk on. Ray Bradbury, for instance." In spite of his reputation, Bradbury maintained in Writer, "I do not feel like a science fiction writer at all," stating that much of his work is too fantastic to be considered science fiction, which he felt had to be based on possibilities for the future. Regardless of how his work has been classified, whether in his prose, his children's stories, his poetry, his noir mysteries, or his plays, it is clear that his writings have had a profound affect on his audiences. Writer contributor Beatrice Cassina summed up what makes Bradbury's work stand out: "In his writing we meet people like us; people who are not all that involved with futuristic machines; human beings who cry, love and sometimes live in doubt. We read about people who are emotionally involved with their lives, and about places and times that everybody can, in some way, recognize and relate to."

Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. "At age six he began reading comic strips," reported David Steinberg in the Albuquerque Journal. By the age of eight he was eagerly reading the popular pulp magazines of the time, such as Amazing Stories. Steinberg continued, "From there he moved on to reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and Warlord of Mars and the novels of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne." He started writing when he was twelve years old, and has been reported to have written a short story every week from then on. In 1934 the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California. Bradbury began to work seriously on his writing at that time, his efforts including attendance at a writing class taught by science fiction master Robert Heinlein. His first published story appeared in an amateur fan magazine in 1938. He continued to work hard on honing his writing craft, and by the 1940s he was publishing in the better magazines and receiving national recognition for his work, winning several important awards and being featured in major anthologies. His first short story collection, Dark Carnival, later published by its better-known title October Country, features eerie and fantastic short stories, including "The Homecoming," the first tale to introduce the Elliott family, who appear in his later fiction.

In 1950 Bradbury published The Martian Chronicles, a cycle of stories chronicling the Earth's colonization of, and eventual destruction of, the planet Mars. The portrayal of the Martians ranged from sympathetic to threatening, but the stories really focus on the Earthling colonists. The Martian Chronicles was lavishly praised by such literary standouts as Christopher Isherwood, Orville Prescott, and Angus Wilson, bringing its author a standing as a writer of highest merit. "The book owed much to the American tradition of frontier literature, and quickly consolidated Bradbury's reputation as one of science fiction's leading stylists," commented an essayist for St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers. The book continued to be published throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first; a 2000 edition was published with dates pushed back, so that the events take place in 2030 instead of 1999. "I did not change them for any other reason than to encourage (people) to go to Mars," he told Steven G. Reed of the Sarasota Herald Tribune. "I didn't want people to read the book and get discouraged, you see." In the years The Martian Chronicles has been in print, it has been made into a movie, a miniseries, a radio show, a stage play, and an interactive adventure game on CD-ROM. According to a contributor to the Newark, NJ, Star Ledger, on Bradbury's eighty-third birthday, the author made the following wish, "One night, 100 years from now, a youngster will stay up late reading The Martian Chronicles with a flashlight under his blanket--on the Red Planet."

The Illustrated Man, which appeared the following year, is another story cycle; in this volume, though, each story represents a tattoo that has come alive. The Martian setting of the previous book is revisited in a few of the tales, notably "The Fire Balloons," which probes the question of whether or not an alien life form can receive Christian grace. The amoral tendencies of children is the basis of "The Veldt" and "Zero Hour." In "Kaleidoscope," Bradbury dramatized the fate of a crew of astronauts whose spaceship has exploded, and who are drifting through space to slowly meet their deaths. Charles De Lint, reviewing a new edition of the collection published in 1997 for the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, commented that the stories are "still as vibrant and startling and telling" as they were when the book was published, containing "strong characters, fascinating ideas, crisp dialogue."

The novella Fahrenheit 451 is, along with The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury's most famous work. In this story, "firemen" are those who set forbidden books aflame, rather than those who put out fires. Guy Montag, the protagonist, is a fireman himself; however, he begins to question his work when he takes home one of the books he is supposed to have destroyed and reads it. Fahrenheit 451 is a somewhat simple tale, "as much an attack on mass culture as it is a satire of McCarthy-era censorship," remarked the essayist for St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers. The tale implies that the government-sanctioned illiteracy is the outgrowth of pandering to special interest groups in the mass media, as well as a result of the rise of television. A society of outcasts is the only bastion of great literature; its members dedicate themselves to memorizing the great books of the world. Many commentators note a disturbing similarity between Bradbury's fictional world and our real one. The repressive future world is so vividly depicted in this work that the novella has become as much a staple of political study as George Orwell's 1984. Fahrenheit 451 has become both a banned book and a book used in many high school classrooms to discuss the topic of censorship. In 2002 Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn used the book as the focus of a citywide reading campaign.

Fahrenheit 451 has an interesting history: the germ of the idea came to Bradbury when he was a teenager, watching a newsreel of Nazis performing a book burning in Berlin. The first draft, published as "The Fireman," introduces Montag for the first time, and was written in nine days on a typewriter that Bradbury rented in the library for ten cents per half hour. At the urging of a publisher, Bradbury expanded the novella into its current form. The title, Fahrenheit 451, refers to the temperature at which paper ignites. Robert A. Baker, in an article for the Syracuse, NY, Post-Standard, reported that Bradbury explained, "he called several places to get the answer before thinking of the fire department. He asked the fire chief, who left the phone briefly before returning to tell him '451 Fahrenheit.' 'I hope he wasn't lying to me,' Bradbury said." Reviewers of the anniversary edition made a point of acknowledging the book's continued relevance. "It has reminded readers over the past fifty years that books can be dangerous things," wrote a reviewer from Australia's Canberra Times.

After the publication of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury moved away from the science fiction genre with which he had become identified. He published other story collections during the 1950s containing a mix of fantasies, stories set in Mexico (a setting which had a lasting fascination for the author), crime stories, and small town tales. In A Medicine for Melancholy, Bradbury published his first stories concerning Irish life and character. This interest, sparked during a stay in Ireland in 1954, would be another ongoing concern in his work for years to come. He also continued publishing regularly in magazines, both inside the science fiction genre and in more mainstream publications.

Published in 1962, Something Wicked This Way Comes was Bradbury's first full-length novel, and another of his best-known works. This fantasy concerns a malevolent carnival that disrupts life in a small Midwestern town. The action occurs mostly at night and explores the darker parts of humanity. The supernatural powers within the carnival have the power to grant dreams, but also to steal away one's soul. "The merry-go-round, the Hall of Mirrors, the parade and other carnivalesque trappings become truly creepy under Bradbury's skillful pen," noted the writer for St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Bradbury's subject matter became more realistic, and his output slightly less prolific. His themes were frequently rather dark, concerning dysfunctional marriages, fear of aging and death, and more warnings on the dangers of technology. Such stories can be found in The Machineries of Joy and I Sing the Body Electric! The author also worked on nonfiction, plays, editing of anthologies, and writing children's stories. Many of his plays are adaptations of his short stories, and they have continued to appear on stage over the years and in many incarnations. Bradbury's love of theater began at an early age; he was cast for the first time in a musical when he was twelve years old. "His second love has always been theater," reported Ben P. Indick in Publishers Weekly. In 2003 Los Angeles theaters featured no less than four of Bradbury's plays.

Bradbury's children's books have featured elements of his science fiction writing; Switch on the Night tells of a boy who is afraid of the darkness until a girl named Dark shows him that there are many things to be experienced at night that can't be seen or heard during the day: the stars, the crickets, the croaking frogs. In 1993 Switch on the Night was published with new illustrations by Caldecott Medalists Leo and Diane Dillon. Another of Bradbury's children's tales, Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines, tells the story of a young boy who is separated from his family in the desert and rescued by an "old god" who shows him the meaning of life.

In 1985 Bradbury published a long-awaited new novel, a noir mystery titled Death Is a Lonely Business. Based loosely on his early years as a writer in the pulp fiction market, it features a protagonist whose optimism works to save him from the strange deaths that are striking down his comrades. Characters introduced in this book are the tough cop Elmo Crumley and the hard-living Constance, both of whom appear in later mysteries; with these two, wrote John Coleman of London's Sunday Times, Bradbury has "created a memorable couple of tough, compassionate characters: the match for any Martian."

A Graveyard for Lunatics is another noir tale of a writer, working in Hollywood during the 1950s, who discovers a body, frozen in time, in the graveyard next to the studio that employs him. There are autobiographical threads in this story as well; Bradbury wrote for such popular early television shows as The Twilight Zone and the Alfred Hitchcock series, and his work in Hollywood included writing the award-winning screen adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. "Bradbury is at his best when he grants real people and actual events the quality of hallucinations," commented Stefan Kanfer in his Time review of A Graveyard for Lunatics. Sybil Steinberg, writing for Publishers Weekly, pointed out that "Bradbury toes the fine line between reality and illusion."

Using another of his screenwriting experiences, Bradbury developed the novel Green Shadows, White Whale around his work adapting Moby-Dick as a screenplay in Ireland. In the novel, the director John Huston has a large impact on everything that occurs--reviewers compared Huston in the novel to the white whale in Melville's original tale. Kanfer, again writing for Time, called the novel Bradbury's "most entertaining book in a distinguished fifty-year career." A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted, "Bradbury's prose is as vibrant and distinctive as the landscape in which these delightful tales are set."

Several of Bardbury's short story collections were released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Driving Blind features twenty-one new tales by the author. One More for the Road is a collection of short stories and novellas, most of them new to print. Several of Bradbury's earlier themes appear here as well: nostalgia for childhood, love, and time travel. Dorman T. Shindler of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted that Bradbury's writing has a "fluid, elegiac style that's impossible to copy." A Kirkus Reviews contributor considered the collection "slight, affecting, voluble, exuberant," and Roland Green, writing for Booklist, stated that "Bradbury is justly considered a master of the short story."

As Bradbury turned eighty-three, he selected one hundred of his stories to be collected in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. "This will quite likely go down as grandmaster Bradbury's magnum opus," commented a critic for Kirkus Reviews. Bradbury's 2004 collection The Cat's Pajamas combines new stories with "lost" stories, written early in his career but never before published; "old or new, they are remarkably of a piece," Ray Olson noted in his Booklist review. Some critics felt that Bradbury's earlier unpublished stories were stronger than the collection's newer stories. According to Meg Jones in her review for Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, "Bradbury still writes great stories, but it's his older tales that shine in this collection." However, Jessie Milligan, also writing for the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, was unabashed in her praise: "This collection is a true gift from a powerful writing talent who has entertained Americans for almost sixty years."

With From the Dust Returned, Bradbury returns to the Elliot family of "The Homecoming." The Elliots live in a Victorian style castle; each of them has a supernatural ability that makes them something more or less than human. "Like the members of his Family, Bradbury's talents are immortal," praised Shindler, this time writing for the Denver Post. "The book reads like liquid poetry while telling the interconnected stories of a number of unusual ... family members," Rachel Singer Gordon declared in her Library Journal review. Featured family members include Grand-Mere, a mummy who was once a pharoah's daughter; Uncle Einar, whose bat wings allow the younger family members to use him as a kite; Cecy, who enters people's minds and occasionally controls their actions; and Timothy, a human foundling who is recording the family history.

In 2003 Bradbury penned another mystery with a film noir flavor: Let's All Kill Constance. "When Bradbury writes stories set during Hollywood's heyday of the '40s and '50s, the result is a crackerjack tale full of sly wit and gentle insight," Shindler praised in his review of the book for the Austin American Statesman. In this tale, the screenwriter/detective who appeared in Death Is a Lonely Business and A Graveyard for Lunatics is asked for help by Constance Rattigan, an aging film star who seems to be the next prey of a killer. Constance visits the screenwriter in the middle of the night, producing an old address book of hers and an ancient phone book, both of which have old contacts and friends marked with red crucifixes. Once Constance confesses her fears, she vanishes into the night, leaving the screenwriter to try to pick up her trail--along which there are plenty of dead bodies. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book a "whirlwind of staccato dialogue, puns and references to old Hollywood," and added that "it's the author's exuberant voice more than the mystery itself that will have readers hooked." Meg Jones, in a review of the book for Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, concluded, "In Bradbury's breathless and unbeatable prose, the mystery slowly reveals itself like a flickering projector in a darkened theater."

Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars, a collection of 37 essays, was published in 2005. Some essays provide a background for the creation of many of Bradbury's classic stories, and in others the author provides "opinions galore on books, movies, [science fiction] and the people and places in his life," according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor. The same reviewer called the collection "uneven," stating that Bradbury sometimes resorts to "preening and ranting." However, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly claimed that in this collection, the author's "enthusiasm remains as contagious as ever."

Throughout his career, Bradbury has remained an energetic and insightful writer. Damon Knight observed in his In Search of Wonder: Critical Essays on Science Fiction: "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 twentieth-century neurosis. Bradbury the isolated spark of consciousness, awake and alone at midnight; Bradbury the grown-up child who still remembers, still believes." As Shindler wrote in his Denver Post article, "After nearly six decades of professional publication, Ray Bradbury could lie back and relax. ... Yet, instead of resting on his laurels, Bradbury is riding his third wind into a creative vortex, hurling out screenplays, stage adaptations, new stories," not to mention new novels. In addition, Bradbury has declared he has no intention of slowing down. He still writes every day. "It is not that I have to," he explained to Beatrice Cassina in Writer. "It is just that I feel I need to. Every day, every morning when I wake up. It is nice to be in the twenty-first century. It is like a new challenge. It is really a good and threatening new century to create for!"

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born August 22, 1920, in Waukegan IL; son of Leonard Spaulding and Esther (Moberg) Bradbury; married Marguerite Susan McClure, September 27, 1947 (died, 2003); children: Susan Marguerite, Ramona, Bettina, Alexandra. Education: Attended schools in Waukegan, IL, and Los Angeles, CA. Politics: Independent. Religion: Unitarian Universalist. Avocational Interests: Painting in oil and water colors, collecting Mexican artifacts. Memberships: Writers Guild of America, Screen Writers Guild, Science Fantasy Writers of America, Pacific Art Foundation. Addresses: Home: 10265 Cheviot Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90064. Agent: Don Congdon, 156 Fifth Ave., No. 625, New York, NY 10010. E-mail: RayBradbury@harpercollins.com.

AWARDS
O. Henry Prize, 1947 and 1948; Benjamin Franklin Award, 1953-54, for "Sun and Shadow"; gold medal, Commonwealth Club of California, 1954, for Fahrenheit 451; National Institute of Arts and Letters award, 1954, for contribution to American literature; Junior Book Award, Boys' Clubs of America, 1956, for Switch on the Night; Golden Eagle Award, 1957, for screenwriting; Academy Award nomination for best short film, 1963, for Icarus Montgolfier Wright; Mrs. Ann Radcliffe Award, Count Dracula Society, 1965, 1971; Writers Guild Award, 1974; World Fantasy Award, 1977, for lifetime achievement; D.Litt., Whittier College, 1979, Woodbury University, 2005; Balrog Award, 1979, for best poet; Aviation and Space Writers Award, 1979, for television documentary; Gandalf Award, 1980; Body of Work Award, PEN, 1985; inducted into the University of Kansas Center for the Study of Science Fiction's Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, 1999; medal for "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters," National Book Foundation, 2000; Bram Stoker Award nominee in novel category, Horror Writers Association, 2001, for From the Dust Returned, and 2003, for One More for the Road; the play version of The Martian Chronicles won five Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards; Grand Master Nebula Award, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; star on Hollywood Walk of Fame; National Medal of the Arts, 2004; honorary degree, National University of Ireland, 2005.

CAREER
Newsboy in Los Angeles, CA, 1940-43; full-time writer, 1943--.