Ray Bradbury

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Ray Bradbury in 1945.

Ray Douglas Bradbury (born August 22, 1920) is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer best known for The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 book which has been described both as a short story collection and a novel, and his 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451.

Beginnings

Bradbury (his given name is not Raymond) was born in Waukegan, Illinois to a Swedish immigrant mother and a father who was a power and telephone lineman. His paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were newspaper publishers. Bradbury was a reader and writer throughout his youth, spending much time in the Carnegie Library in Waukegan. His novels Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes depict the town of Waukegan as "Green Town" and are semi-autobiographical. The Bradbury family lived in Tucson, Arizona, in 1926–1927 and 1932–1933, each time returning to Waukegan, and eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1934, when Ray was thirteen.

Bradbury graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1938 but chose not to attend college. Instead, he sold newspapers at the corner of South Norton Avenue and Olympic Boulevard. He continued to educate himself at the local library, and having been influenced by science fiction heroes like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, he began to publish science fiction stories in fanzines in 1938. His first paid piece was for the pulp magazine Super Science Stories in 1941. He became a full-time writer by the end of 1942. His first book, Dark Carnival, a collection of short works, was published in 1947 by Arkham House. He married Marguerite McClure (1922–2003) in 1947, and they had four daughters.

Works

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Ray Bradbury in 1976.

For Bradbury, there is some blurring of categories, and the distinctions in his works are somewhat subjective, for he frequently has written multiple short stories about a set of characters or a subject, making minor edits or adding supplemental material, and calling the results a novel. Although he is often described as a science fiction writer, Bradbury does not box himself into a particular narrative categorization:

"First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time — because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power." [1]

Besides his fiction work, Bradbury has written many short essays on the arts and culture, attracting the attention of critics in this field. Bradbury was a consultant for the American Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair and the exhibit housed in Epcot's Spaceship Earth geosphere at Walt Disney World .

Adaptations of his work

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Oskar Werner and Julie Christie in Fahrenheit 451 (1966), a movie directed by François Truffaut and based on the novel.

Many of Bradbury's stories and novels have been adapted to films, radio, television, theater and comic books. In 1951–1954, twenty-seven of Bradbury's stories were adapted by Al Feldstein for EC Comics, sixteen of which were collected in the books The Autumn People (1965) and Tomorrow Midnight (1966). Also in the early 1950s, adaptations of Bradbury's stories were televised on a variety of shows including Tales of Tomorrow, Lights Out, Out There, Suspense, CBS Television Workshop, Jane Wyman's Fireside Theatre, Star Tonight, Windows and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

A half-hour film adaptation of Bradbury's "The Merry-Go Round", praised by Variety, was shown on Starlight Summer Theater in 1954 and NBC's Sneak Preview in 1956. For The Ray Bradbury Theater, first seen on TV from 1985 to 1992, Bradbury adapted 65 of his stories. The Martian Chronicles became a 1980 TV miniseries starring Rock Hudson.

Director Jack Arnold first brought Bradbury to movie theaters in 1953 with It Came from Outer Space, a Harry Essex screenplay developed from Bradbury's screen treatment, "The Meteor". Three weeks later, Eugène Lourié's The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), based on Bradbury's "The Fog Horn," about a sea monster mistaking the sound of a fog horn for the mating cry of a female, was released. Bradbury's close friend Ray Harryhausen produced the stop-motion animation of the creature. Over the next 50 years, more than 35 features, shorts, and TV movies were based on Bradbury's stories or screenplays.

Recently, Peter Hyams' film version of Bradbury's 1953 story, A Sound of Thunder (2005), brought an almost unanimous negative reaction from film critics. Reviewing for The New York Times, A.O. Scott observed that "it illustrates the dangers of turning a lean, elegant short story into a loud, noisy, incoherent B movie."

A new film version of Fahrenheit 451 is being planned by director Frank Darabont; an earlier version was directed by François Truffaut in 1966. In 2002, Bradbury's own Pandemonium Theatre Company production of Fahrenheit 451 at Burbank's Falcon Theatre combined live acting with projected digital animation by the Pixel Pups. Bradbury and director Charles Rome Smith co-founded Pandemonium in 1964, staging the New York production of The World of Ray Bradbury (1964), adaptations of "The Pedestrian," "The Veldt" and "To the Chicago Abyss."

Controversy over titles

In 2004 it was reported that Bradbury was extremely upset with filmmaker Michael Moore for using the title Fahrenheit 9/11, which is an allusion to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, for his documentary about the George W. Bush administration. Bradbury called Moore "a horrible human being," but stated that his resentment was not politically motivated.[2] Bradbury asserts that he does not want any of the money made by the movie, nor does he believe that he deserves it. He pressured Moore to change the "stolen" name, but to no avail. Moore called Bradbury two weeks before the film's release in 2004 to apologize, saying that the film's marketing was set in motion a long time ago, and it was too late to change the title.

Honors and awards

2004 award recipient Ray Bradbury with President George W. Bush and his wife Laura Bush.

• For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Ray Bradbury was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6644 Hollywood Blvd.
• An asteroid is named in his honor, "9766 Bradbury," along with a crater on the moon called "Dandelion Crater" (named after his novel, Dandelion Wine.)
• On November 17, 2004, Bradbury was the recipient of the National Medal of Arts, presented by President George W. Bush and Laura Bush. Bradbury has also received the World Fantasy Award life achievement, Stoker Award life achievement, SFWA Grand Master, SF Hall of Fame Living Inductee, and First Fandom Award. He received an Emmy Award for his work on The Halloween Tree.

• The "About the Author" sections in several of his published works claim that he has been nominated for an Academy Award. A search of the Academy's awards database [3] proves this to be incorrect. Two films he worked on, Icarus Montgolfier Wright and Moby Dick, were nominated for Academy Awards, but Bradbury himself has not been.

Trivia

• One well known irony is that Bradbury, despite writing about spaceships and interplanetary travel and having lived in Los Angeles for most of his life, has never driven a car. He attributes this to having seen a gruesome car accident when he was young.
• Bradbury never flew in an airplane until the age of 62. Later, he flew on the Concorde to Paris, where he worked with Disney on the new Disneyland being created in France. He did enjoy a ride in the Goodyear Blimp when he was 48.
• Helped with many projects over the years with the Walt Disney Company, including the futurist park EPCOT and also got his inspiration for being an advocate for the proposed L.A. monorail system from the Disneyland monorail system.
• At the age of fifteen, Bradbury read Jack Woodford's book on writing, Trial and Error, which had a large influence on his career. He also attributes his lifelong daily writing habit to the day in 1932 when a carnival entertainer, Mr. Electrico, touched him with an electrified sword, made his hair stand on end, and shouted, "Live forever!"

List of Bradbury works

Novels

• (1950) The Martian Chronicles
• (1953) Fahrenheit 451
• (1957) Dandelion Wine
• (1962) Something Wicked This Way Comes
• (1972) The Halloween Tree
• (1985) Death Is a Lonely Business
• (1990) A Graveyard for Lunatics
• (1992) Green Shadows, White Whale
• (2001) From the Dust Returned
• (2003) Let's All Kill Constance
• (2003) It Came from Outer Space
• (2006) Farewell Summer (October 1)

Short story collections

• (1947) Dark Carnival
• (1951) The Illustrated Man
• (1953) The Golden Apples of the Sun
• (1955) The October Country
• (1959) A Medicine for Melancholy
• (1962) R is for Rocket
• (1964) The Machineries of Joy
• (1965) The Vintage Bradbury
• (1966) S is for Space
• (1969) I Sing The Body Electric
• (1976) Long After Midnight
• (1980) The Stories of Ray Bradbury
• (1984) A Memory of Murder
• (1988) The Toynbee Convector
• (1996) Quicker Than The Eye
• (1998) Driving Blind
• (2002) One More for the Road
• (2003) Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
• (2004) The Cat's Pajamas: Stories
• (2005) A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories

In addition to these collections, many of the stories have been published in multi-author anthologies. Almost 50 additional Bradbury stories have never been collected anywhere after their initial publication in periodicals.

Screenplays and teleplays

• (1953) It Came from Outer Space (original story)
• (1956) Moby Dick
• Jane Wyman Presents The Fireside Theatre
  • (1956) The Bullet Trick / The Marked Bullet
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents
  • (1956) Shopping for Death
  • (1958) Design for Loving
  • (1959) Special Delivery
  • (1962) The Faith of Aaron Menefee (from the story by Stanley Ellin)
• Steve Canyon
  • (1959) The Gift
• Trouble Shooters
  • (1959) The Tunnel to Yesterday
• (1961) King of Kings (narration, uncredited)
• The Twilight Zone
  • (1962) I Sing the Body Electric
• Alcoa Premiere
  • (1962) The Jail
• (1962) Icarus Montgolfier Wright
• The Alfred Hitchcock Hour
  • (1964) The Life Work of Juan Diaz
• (1969) The Picasso Summer
• The Curiosity Shop
  • (1971) The Groon
• (1979) Gnomes
• (1982) The Electric Grandmother
• (1983) Something Wicked This Way Comes
• (1983) Quest
• (1985-1992) The Ray Bradbury Theater
• The Twilight Zone
  • (1986) The Elevator
• (1992) Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland
• (1993) The Halloween Tree
• (1998) The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit

This list does not include adaptations by others of Bradbury's published stories.

Radio

• World Security Workshop
  • (1947) The Meadow
• Suspense
  • (1947) Riabouchinska (original story)
  • (1948) Summer Night (original story)
  • (1948) The Screaming Woman (original story)
• (1968) Leviathan '99

This list does not include adaptations by others of Bradbury's published stories.

Poetry

• (1975) When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
• (1977) Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns
• (1981) The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope
• (2002) They Have Not Seen the Stars: The Collected Poetry of Ray Bradbury

Plays

• (1948) The Meadow
• (1963) The Anthem Sprinters and Other Antics
• (1966) The Day It Rained Forever
• (1966) The Pedestrian
• (1972) The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays
• (1975) Pillar of Fire and Other Plays
• (1986) Fahrenheit 451
• (1986) The Martian Chronicles
• (1988) Dandelion Wine
• (1988) Falling Upward
• (1988) Bradbury on Stage: A Chrestomathy of His Plays

Children

• (1955) Switch on the Night
• (1997) With Cat for Comforter
• (1997) Dogs Think That Every Day Is Christmas

Fable

• (1998) Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines

Non-fiction

• (1990) Zen in the Art of Writing
• (1991) Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures
• (2004) Conversations With Ray Bradbury
• (2005) Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars

Further reading

• William F. Nolan, The Ray Bradbury Companion: A Life and Career History, Photolog, and Comprehensive Checklist of Writings, Gale Research (1975). Hardcover, 339 pages. ISBN 0-8103-0930-0
• Jerry Weist, Bradbury, an Illustrated Life: A Journey to Far Metaphor, William Morrow & Company (2002). Hardcover, 208 pages. ISBN 0060011823
• Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce, Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, Kent State University Press (2004). Hardcover, 320 pages. ISBN 0873387791
• Sam Weller, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, HarperCollins (2005). Hardcover, 384 pages. ISBN 006054581X

Documentaries about Ray Bradbury

• Bradbury's works and approach to writing are documented in Terry Sanders' film Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer (1963).
• Bradbury's later life was satirized in an Internet short by Invisible Engine called The Adventures of Ray Bradbury, in which Ray has two fictitious sons and a fictitious autistic daughter, as well as an African-American doppelganger who goes by the obvious name of "Black Ray Bradbury." The episode concludes with a "To Be Continued" title card, but there has yet to be a second episode.

External links

• Ray Bradbury - Official site
• Bradbury Media - Extensive coverage of work in film, TV, radio plus exhaustive short story cross-reference.
• Ray Bradbury at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer, film by Terry Sanders
• Illustrated guide to Bradbury's stories (English, Polish and Russian languages)
• Exhaustive bibliography at FantasticFiction.com
• Survey of Scholarship Detailed look at critical scholarship of Bradbury's works throughout his career.
• Two audio interviews of Ray Bradbury (1992 and 1993), RealAudio
• Videos of Bradbury on the Internet, censorship and other subjects
• Biography and Pictures

Credits

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