Ray Bradbury biography
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury; August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.
Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works 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 and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space.
Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).
The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".
Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to Esther (née Moberg) Bradbury (1888–1966), a Swedish immigrant, and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury (1890–1957), a power and telephone lineman of English ancestry. He was given the middle name "Douglas" after actor Douglas Fairbanks.
Bradbury was surrounded by an extended family during his early childhood and formative years in Waukegan. His grandparents lived next door, and an aunt read him short stories when he was a child. This period provided foundations for both the author and his stories. In Bradbury's fiction, 1920s Waukegan becomes Green Town, Illinois.
The Bradbury family lived in Tucson, Arizona, during 1926–1927 and 1932–1933 while their father pursued employment, each time returning to Waukegan. While in Tucson, Bradbury attended Amphi Junior High School and Roskruge Junior High School. They eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1934 when Bradbury was 14. The family arrived with only US$40 (equivalent to $940 in 2024), which paid for rent and food until his father finally found a job making wire at a cable company for $14 a week (equivalent to $329 in 2024), allowing them to stay in Hollywood.
Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School and was active in the drama club. He often roller-skated through Hollywood in hopes of meeting celebrities. Among the creative people he met were special-effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen and radio star George Burns. Bradbury's first pay as a writer, at age 14, was for a joke he sold to George Burns to use on the Burns and Allen radio show
Bradbury was fascinated with carnivals from a young age, and they would feature in such works as The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He related a formative event of his youth:
I suppose the most important memory is of Mr. Electrico. On Labor Day weekend, 1932, when I was twelve years old, he came to my hometown with the Dill Brothers ... He was a performer sitting in an electric chair and a stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. I sat below, in the front row, and he reached down with a flaming sword full of electricity and he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose and he cried, "Live, forever!" And I thought, "God, that's wonderful. How do you do that?" ... So when I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of "Beautiful Ohio" and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks because I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. And so I went home and within days I started to write. And I've never stopped.
Throughout his youth, Bradbury was an avid reader and writer and knew at a young age that he was "going into one of the arts". Bradbury began writing his own stories at age 12 (1931), sometimes writing on butcher paper.
In his youth, he spent much time in the Carnegie Library in Waukegan, reading such authors as H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. At 12, he began writing traditional horror stories and said he tried to imitate Poe until he was about 18. Bradbury's favorite writers growing up included Katherine Anne Porter, Edith Wharton, and Jessamyn West.
He loved the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially his John Carter of Mars series; The Warlord of Mars impressed him so much that at age 12, he wrote his own sequel. The young Bradbury was also a cartoonist and loved to illustrate. He wrote about Tarzan and drew his own Sunday panels. He listened to the radio show Chandu the Magician, and every night when the show went off the air, he wrote out the entire script from memory.
As a teen in Beverly Hills, he often visited his mentor and friend, science-fiction writer Bob Olsen, sharing ideas and maintaining contact. In 1936, at a secondhand bookstore in Hollywood, Bradbury discovered a handbill promoting meetings of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. Excited to find others who shared his interest, he joined a Thursday-night conclave at age 16.
Bradbury cited Verne and Wells as his primary science-fiction influences. He identified with Verne, saying: "He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally.” Bradbury admitted that he stopped reading science-fiction books in his 20s and embraced a broad field of literature that included poets Alexander Pope and John Donne. He had just graduated from high school when he met Robert A. Heinlein, then 31. Bradbury recalled: "He was well known, and he wrote humanistic science fiction, which influenced me to dare to be human instead of mechanical." During his young adulthood, Bradbury read stories published in Astounding Science Fiction, and read everything by Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and A. E. van Vogt.
The family lived about four blocks from the Fox Uptown Theatre on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, the flagship theater for MGM and Fox. There, Bradbury learned how to sneak in and watched previews almost every week. He roller skated there, as well as all over town, as he put it, "hell-bent on getting autographs from glamorous stars. It was glorious." Among stars the young Bradbury was thrilled to encounter were Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, and Ronald Colman. Sometimes he spent all day in front of Paramount Pictures or Columbia Pictures, then skated to the Brown Derby to watch the stars who came and went for meals. He recounted seeing Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, and Mae West, who, he learned, made a regular appearance every Friday night, bodyguard in tow.
Bradbury's "Undersea
Guardians" was the
cover story for the
December 1944 issue of
Amazing Stories.
Bradbury was free to start a career in writing when, owing to his bad eyesight, he was rejected for induction into the military during World War II. Inspired by science-fiction heroes such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, he began publishing science-fiction stories in fanzines in 1938. He was invited by Forrest J. Ackerman to attend the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, which at the time met at Clifton's Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles.
There he met Robert A. Heinlein, Emil Petaja, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett and Jack Williamson. Bradbury's first published story was "Hollerbochen's Dilemma", in the January 1938 number of Ackerman's fanzine Imagination!. In July 1939, Ackerman and his girlfriend Morojo gave 19-year-old Bradbury the money to head to New York for the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York City, and funded Bradbury's fanzine, Futuria Fantasia. Bradbury wrote most of its four issues, each volume printed in limited numbers due to publishing costs. Between 1940 and 1947, he was a contributor to Rob Wagner's film magazine, Script.
In 1939, Bradbury joined Laraine Day's Wilshire Players Guild, where for two years he wrote and acted in several plays. They were, as Bradbury later described, "so incredibly bad" that he gave up play-writing for two decades. His first paid piece, "Pendulum", written with Henry Hasse, was published in the pulp magazine Super Science Stories in November 1941, for which he earned $15.
Bradbury sold his first solo story, "The Lake", for $13.75 at 22 and became a full-time writer by 24. His first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947 by Arkham House, a small press in Sauk City, Wisconsin, owned by August Derleth. Reviewing Dark Carnival for the New York Herald Tribune, Will Cuppy proclaimed Bradbury "suitable for general consumption" and predicted that he would become a writer of the caliber of British fantasist John Collier.
After a rejection notice from the pulp Weird Tales, Bradbury submitted "Homecoming" to Mademoiselle, where it was spotted by a young editorial assistant named Truman Capote. Capote picked the Bradbury manuscript from a slush pile, which led to its publication. "Homecoming" won a place in the O. Henry Award Stories of 1947.
Bradbury first published The Fireman, a short story about 25,000 words long, in Galaxy Science Fiction in February 1951. Bradbury was asked to extend it by 25,000 words so that it would be published as a novel. Bradbury got the title after the Los Angeles fire chief told him that book paper burns at 451 °F. In UCLA's Powell Library, in a study room with typewriters for rent for ten cents per half-hour, Bradbury wrote his classic story of a book burning future, Fahrenheit 451, which was about 50,000 words long, costing him $9.80 in typewriter rental fees. Fahrenheit 451 was also published in serial form in the March, April and May 1954 issues of Playboy Magazine. Fahrenheit 451 remains a staple in discussions about censorship and dystopian futures.
A chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore with British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood gave Bradbury the opportunity to put The Martian Chronicles into the hands of a respected critic. Isherwood's glowing review followed.
Bradbury attributed his lifelong habit of writing every day to two incidents. The first, when he was three years old, was his mother's taking him to see Lon Chaney in the 1923 silent film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The second occurred in 1932, when a carnival entertainer, one Mr. Electrico, knighted the young man with an electrified sword and intoned: "Live forever!" Bradbury remarked: "I felt that something strange and wonderful had happened to me because of my encounter with Mr. Electrico ... he gave me a future ... I began to write, full-time. I have written every single day of my life since that day 69 years ago."
At that age, Bradbury first started to do magic, which was his first great love. He said that had he not discovered writing, he would have become a magician.
Bradbury claimed a wide variety of influences, and described discussions he might have had with his favorite writers, among them Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Wolfe. From Steinbeck, he learned "how to write objectively and yet insert all of the insights without too much extra comment." He studied Eudora Welty for her "remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line."
Bradbury was once described as a "Midwest surrealist" and is often labeled a science-fiction writer. He resisted that categorization, however, defining science fiction as "the art of the possible." 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.
Bradbury recounted when he came into his own as a writer, the afternoon he wrote a short story about his first encounter with death. When he was a boy, he met a young girl at a lake edge and she went out into the water and never came back. Years later, as he wrote about it in "The Lake", tears flowed from him. He recognized he had taken the leap from emulating the many writers he admired to connecting with his voice as a writer.
When later asked about the source of the lyrical power of his prose, he replied: "From reading so much poetry every day of my life. My favorite writers have been those who've said things well." He said: "If you're reluctant to weep, you won't live a full and complete life."
In high school, Bradbury was active in the poetry and drama clubs. Planning to become an actor, he became serious about writing as his high-school years progressed. He graduated from Los Angeles High School, where he took poetry classes with Snow Longley Housh and short-story writing courses taught by Jeannet Johnson. The teachers recognized his talent and furthered his interest in writing, but he did not attend college. Instead, he sold newspapers at the corner of South Norton Avenue and Olympic Boulevard. In regard to his education, Bradbury said:
Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight years old.
He told The Paris Review: "You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don't.”
He considered science to be 'incidental' to his writing. He claimed not to be interested in the development of science, but hoped to use it as a form of social commentary and as an allegorical technique.
He described his inspiration: "My stories run up and bite me in the leg—I respond by writing them down—everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off".
An imagined version of Waukegan, Green Town is a symbol of safety and home, which is often the setting for tales of the macabre and the dark fantastic. It serves as the setting of his semiautobiographical classics Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Farewell Summer, as well as many of his short stories. In Green Town, Bradbury's favorite uncle sprouts wings, traveling carnivals conceal supernatural powers, and his grandparents provide room and board to Charles Dickens. Perhaps the definitive use of Green Town is in Summer Morning, Summer Night, a collection of short stories and vignettes exclusively set in the town. Bradbury returns to the signature locale as a look back at the rapidly disappearing small-town world of the American heartland, which was the foundation of his roots.
Bradbury lived in his parents' home until, in 1947, at age 27, he married Marguerite McClure (January 16, 1922 – November 24, 2003). They remained married until her death. Maggie, as she was affectionately called, was the only woman he ever dated. They had four daughters: Susan, Ramona, Bettina, and Alexandra. Bradbury never obtained a driver's license, but used public transportation or his bicycle. He was sure his poor eyesight would disqualify him.
Ray was raised Baptist by his parents, who were infrequent churchgoers. As an adult, Bradbury said he considered himself a "delicatessen religionist" who resisted categorization of his beliefs and took guidance from both Eastern and Western faiths. He felt that his career was "a God-given thing, and I'm so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is 'At play in the fields of the Lord'."
Bradbury was a close friend of Charles Addams, and Addams illustrated 1946's "Homecoming", the first of Bradbury's stories about the Elliotts, a family that resembled Addams's own Addams Family, transplanted to rural Illinois. Addams and Bradbury planned a larger collaborative work that would tell the family's complete history, but it never materialized, and according to a 2001 interview, they went their separate ways. In October 2001, Bradbury published all the Family stories he had written in one book with a connecting narrative, From the Dust Returned, featuring a wraparound Addams cover of the original "Homecoming" illustration.
Another of Bradbury's close friends was the special-effects expert Ray Harryhausen, who was best man at Bradbury's wedding. During a BAFTA 2010 awards tribute honoring Harryhausen's 90th birthday, Bradbury spoke about having first met him at Forrest J Ackerman's house when they were both 18. Their shared love for science fiction, King Kong, and The Fountainhead was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. These early influences inspired them to believe in themselves and to affirm their career choices. After their first meeting, they kept in touch at least once a month: their friendship lasted more than 70 years.
Bradbury told of the following encounter with Sergei Bondarchuk, director of the 1966–1967 Soviet epic film War and Peace, at a Hollywood award ceremony in Bondarchuk's honor:
They formed a long queue and as Bondarchuk was walking along it he recognized several people: "Oh Mr. Ford, I like your film." He recognized the director, Greta Garbo, and someone else. I was standing at the very end of the queue and silently watched this. Bondarchuk shouted to me; "Ray Bradbury, is that you?" He rushed up to me, embraced me, dragged me inside, grabbed a bottle of Stolichnaya, sat down at his table where his closest friends were sitting. All the famous Hollywood directors in the queue were bewildered. They stared at me and asked each other "Who is this Bradbury?" And, swearing, they left, leaving me alone with Bondarchuk …
Late in life, Bradbury retained his dedication and passion despite the "devastation of illnesses and deaths of many good friends". Among them was the death of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, an intimate friend for many years. They remained close for nearly 30 years, after Roddenberry asked him to write for Star Trek; Bradbury declined, claiming that he "never had the ability to adapt other people's ideas into any sensible form".
Bradbury suffered a stroke in 1999 that left him partially dependent on a wheelchair. He made regular appearances at science-fiction conventions until 2009, when he retired from the circuit. He continued to write, contributing an essay to the science-fiction issue of The New Yorker about his inspiration for writing; it was published a week before his death.
Bradbury chose a burial place at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, with a headstone that reads "Author of Fahrenheit 451".[86][87] On February 6, 2015, The New York Times reported that the house Bradbury had lived and written in for 50 years, at 10265 Cheviot Drive in Cheviot Hills, Los Angeles, California, had been demolished by the buyer, architect Thom Mayne.[88] Bradbury's home office was moved and recreated in the Ray Bradbury Center in Indianapolis.
Bradbury considered himself a political independent. Raised a Democrat, he voted for the Democratic Party until 1968. In 1952, he took out an advertisement in Variety as an open letter to Republicans, stating: "Every attempt that you make to identify the Democratic Party as the party of Communism, as the 'left-wing' or 'subversive' party, I will attack with all my heart and soul." However, Lyndon B. Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War left Bradbury disenchanted, and from 1968 on he voted for the Republican Party in every presidential election with the exception of 1976, when he voted for Jimmy Carter. According to Bradbury's biographer Sam Weller, Carter's inept handling of the economy "pushed him permanently away from the Democrats".
Bradbury called Ronald Reagan "the greatest president" whereas he dismissed Bill Clinton, calling him a "shithead". In August 2001, shortly before the September 11 attacks, he described George W. Bush as "wonderful" and stated that the American education system was a "monstrosity". He later criticized Barack Obama for ending NASA's crewed space flight program.
In 2010, he criticized big government, saying that there was "too much government" in America, and "I don't believe in government. I hate politics. I'm against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be". Bradbury was against affirmative action, condemned what he called "all this political correctness that's rampant on campuses", and called for a ban of quotas in higher education. He asserted that "education is purely an issue of learning—we can no longer afford to have it polluted by damn politics"
Bradbury died in Los Angeles, California, on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91, after a lengthy illness. His personal library was willed to the Waukegan Public Library, where he had many of his formative reading experiences.
The Los Angeles Times credited him with the ability "to write lyrically and evocatively of lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense of visual clarity and small-town familiarity". His grandson, Danny Karapetian, said Bradbury's works had "influenced so many artists, writers, teachers, scientists, and it's always really touching and comforting to hear their stories."
The Washington Post noted several modern-day technologies that Bradbury had envisioned much earlier, such as the idea of banking ATMs and earbuds and Bluetooth headsets in Fahrenheit 451, and the concepts of artificial intelligence in I Sing the Body Electric.
On June 6, 2012, in an official public statement from the White House Press Office, President Barack Obama said:
“For many Americans, the news of Ray Bradbury's death immediately brought to mind images from his work, imprinted in our minds, often from a young age. His gift for storytelling reshaped our culture and expanded our world. But Ray also understood that our imaginations could be used as a tool for better understanding, a vehicle for change, and an expression of our most cherished values. There is no doubt that Ray will continue to inspire many more generations with his writing, and our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends.”
Several authors and filmmakers paid tribute to Bradbury, noting the influence of his works on their own. Steven Spielberg said that Bradbury was "my muse for the better part of my sci-fi career .... In the world of science fiction and fantasy and imagination he is immortal.” Neil Gaiman said that "the landscape of the world we live in would have been diminished if we had not had him in our world". Joanne Harris called him "a bright, burning spark." Stephen King released a statement on his website saying:
Ray Bradbury wrote three great novels and three hundred great stories. One of the latter was called "A Sound of Thunder". The sound I hear today is the thunder of a giant's footsteps fading away. But the novels and stories remain, in all their resonance and strange beauty.
The Ray Bradbury Center was established in 2007 as the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies and received many of Bradbury's papers and artifacts following his death. It continues the work of documenting, preserving, and providing public access to Bradbury's material legacy.
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