Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American mainstream, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer.
Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury is widely considered one of the greatest and most popular American writers of speculative fiction of the twentieth century.
Easton Press Ray Bradbury books
The Martian Chronicles - Masterpieces of Science Fiction (signed) - 1989
Fahrenheit 451 - Masterpieces of Science Fiction (not signed - red leather) - 1991
Fahrenheit 451 - signed modern classic (black leather) - 1998
Dandelion Wine - Masterpieces of Science Fiction - 2000
Fahrenheit 451 - Great Books of The 20th Century - 2000
From The Dust Returned - signed edition limited to 1400 copies - 2001
Ray Bradbury Stories - signed first edition - 2003
Leviathan '99 - signed first edition - 2007
The Illustrated Man - 2012
Fahrenheit 451 - signed deluxe edition in slip case
Franklin Library Ray Bradbury books
Quicker Than the Eye - signed first edition - 1996
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Ray Bradbury biography
Bradbury 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. He used this library as a setting for much of his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, and depicted Waukegan as "Green Town" in some of his other semi-autobiographical novels — Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer — as well as in many of his short stories.
He attributed his lifelong habit of writing every day to an incident in 1932 when a carnival entertainer, Mr. Electrico, touched him with an electrified sword, made his hair stand on end, and shouted, "Live forever!"
The Bradbury family lived in Tucson, Arizona, in 1926–27 and 1932–33 as his father pursued employment, each time returning to Waukegan, but eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1934, when Ray was thirteen.
Bradbury graduated from the 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. Ray was invited by Forrest J Ackerman to attend the now legendary Clifton’s Cafeteria Science Fiction Club. This was where Ray met the writers Robert A. Heinlein, Emil Petaja, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett, and Jack Williamson. Launching his own fanzine in 1939, titled Futuria Fantasia, he wrote most of its four issues, each limited to under a hundred copies. Bradbury's first paid piece was for the pulp magazine Super Science Stories in 1941, for which he earned $15. 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, a firm owned by writer August Derleth.
A chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore with the 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 and substantially boosted Bradbury's career.
Ray Bradbury married Marguerite McClure (1922–2003) in 1947, and they had four daughters.
Literature
Bradbury was a reader and writer throughout his youth. He knew as a young boy that he was "going into one of the arts." Bradbury was drawing, acting and writing.
In 1932, one of Bradbury's earliest influences was Edgar Allan Poe. At age twelve, Bradbury began writing traditional horror stories and said he tried to imitate Poe until he was about eighteen. At the time, his favorites were also Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter, as well as comic books. He listened to the radio show Chandu the Magician, and when the show went off the air every night he would sit and write the entire script from memory.
In his youth, he spent much time in the Carnegie library in Waukegan, reading such authors as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan of the Apes. He loved Burroughs' The Warlord of Mars so much that at the age of 12 he wrote his own sequel. The young Bradbury also was a cartoonist and loved to illustrate. He wrote about Tarzan and drew his own Sunday panels.
When he was seventeen, Bradbury read stories published in Astounding Science Fiction, and said he read everything by Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and A.E. Van Vogt, but cited H.G. Wells and Jules Verne as his big science fiction influences. Bradbury 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 he stopped reading genre books in his twenties and embraced a broad field of literature that included Alexander Pope and poet John Donne.
An aunt read him short stories when he was a child. He used this library as a setting for much of his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, and depicted Waukegan as "Green Town" in some of his other semi-autobiographical novels — Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer — as well as in many of his short stories.
He attributed to two incidents his lifelong habit of writing every day. The first of these, occurring when he was three years old, was his mother's taking him to see Lon Chaney's performance in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The second incident occurred in 1932, when a carnival entertainer, one Mr. Electrico, touched the young man on the nose with an electrified sword, made his hair stand on end, and shouted, "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." It was at that age that Bradbury first started to do magic, which was his first great love. If he had not discovered writing, he would have become a magician.
Bradbury claimed a wide variety of influences, and described discussions he might have with his favorite poets and writers Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Wolfe. From Steinbeck, he said 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's favorite writers growing up included Katherine Anne Porter, who wrote about the American South, Edith Wharton, and Jessamyn West.
When later asked about the lyrical power of his prose, Bradbury replied, "From reading so much poetry every day of my life. My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well."
In high school, Ray Bradbury was active in both the Poetry Club and the Drama club, continuing plans to become an actor but becoming serious about his writing as his high school years progressed. Bradbury 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."
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."
It was in UCLA's Powell Library, in a study room with typewriters for rent, that Bradbury wrote his classic story of a book-burning future, The Fireman, which was about 25,000 words long. It was later published at about 50,000 words under the name, Fahrenheit 451, for a total cost of $9.80, due to the library's typewriter-rental fees of ten cents per half-hour.
Works
Although he is often described as a science fiction writer, Bradbury did 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."
On another occasion, Bradbury observed that the novel touched on the alienation of people by media:
"In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction."
Besides his fiction work, Bradbury wrote 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 original exhibit housed in Epcot's Spaceship Earth geosphere at Walt Disney World.
Bradbury was a close friend of Charles Addams and collaborated with him on the creation of the macabre "Family" enjoyed by New Yorker readers for many years and later popularized as The Addams Family. Bradbury called them the Elliotts and placed them in rural Illinois. His first story about them was "Homecoming," published in the New Yorker Halloween issue for 1946, with Addams illustrations. He and Addams planned a larger collaborative work that would tell the family's complete history, but it never materialized. 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.
Career
When the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1934, Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School and was active in the drama club. Bradbury often roller-skated through Hollywood in hopes of meeting celebrities. Among the creative and talented people Bradbury met this way were special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen and radio star George Burns. Bradbury's first pay as a writer was at the age of fourteen, when Burns hired him to write for the Burns and Allen show.
In 1936, at a secondhand bookstore in Hollywood, Ray Bradbury discovered a handbill promoting meetings of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. Thrilled to find there were others with his interests, at the age of sixteen Bradbury joined a weekly Thursday-night conclave.
Bradbury began submitting his short stories for publication. After a rejection notice from the pulp magazine Weird Tales, Bradbury submitted to magazines. At Mademoiselle magazine, a young editorial assistant named Truman Capote spotted one of Bradbury's short stories, "Homecoming'". Capote picked the Bradbury manuscript from a slush pile, which led to it getting published in the magazine. Homecoming won a place in The O. Henry Prize Stories of 1947.
Bradbury had just graduated from high school when he met Robert Heinlein, then 31 years old. Bradbury recalled, "He was well known, and he wrote humanistic science fiction, which influenced me to dare to be human instead of mechanical."
His first published story was "Hollerbochen's Dilemma", which appeared in the fanzine Imagination! in January, 1938. In July 1939, Forrest J. Ackerman gave nineteen year old Ray Bradbury the money to head to New York for the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York City, and funded Ray Bradbury's fanzine, titled Futuria Fantasia. Bradbury wrote most of its four issues, each limited to under 100 copies. Between 1941 and 1947, he was a contributor to Rob Wagner's film magazine, Script.
Ray Bradbury was free to start a career in writing when, owing to his bad eyesight, he was rejected admission into the military during World War II. Having been inspired by science fiction heroes like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, Bradbury began to publish science fiction stories in fanzines in 1938. Bradbury 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. This was where he met the writers Robert A. Heinlein, Emil Petaja, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett, and Jack Williamson.
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 playwriting for two decades. Bradbury's 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 story, "The Lake", for $13.75 at the age of twenty-two. He became a full-time writer by the end of 1942. His first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947 by Arkham House, a small press in Sauk City, Wisconsin, owned by writer August Derleth.
A chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore with the 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.
Once described as a "Midwest surrealist", he is generally labeled a science fiction writer. Bradbury resisted that categorization, however:
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. It was named so to represent the temperature at which paper ignites. 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.
On another occasion, Bradbury observed that the novel touches on the alienation of people by media:
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap opera cries, sleep walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
Besides his fiction work, Bradbury wrote many short essays on the arts and culture, attracting the attention of critics in this field. Bradbury also hosted "The Ray Bradbury Theater" which was based on his short stories. Bradbury was a consultant for the American Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair and the original exhibit housed in Epcot's Spaceship Earth geosphere at Walt Disney World. In the 1980s, Bradbury concentrated on detective fiction.
Several comic book writers have adapted Bradbury's stories. Particularly noted among these were EC Comics' line of horror and science-fiction comics, which often featured Bradbury's name on the cover announcing that one story in that issue would be an adaptation of his work. The comics featuring Bradbury's stories included Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Crime Suspenstories, Haunt of Fear and others.
Bradbury remained an enthusiastic playwright all his life, leaving a rich theatrical legacy as well as literary. Bradbury headed the Pandemonium Theatre Company in Los Angeles for many years and had a five-year relationship with the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena.
Ray Bradbury short stories
Ray
Bradbury was a prolific author who wrote numerous short stories, many
of which are considered classics. Some of Ray Bradbury's best short
stories include: The Martian Chronicles (1950) While technically a
collection of interconnected stories, The Martian Chronicles explores
the colonization and eventual decline of Mars by humans. The Veldt
(1950) This story, part of Bradbury's The Illustrated Man collection,
revolves around a futuristic house that caters to the every whim of its
inhabitants, leading to unforeseen consequences. A Sound of Thunder
(1952) A classic tale of time travel and its potential consequences,
this story explores the butterfly effect and the delicate balance of
nature. The Fog Horn (1951) Set in a remote lighthouse, this story tells
the tale of a lonely sea monster responding to the call of a fog horn,
establishing a unique connection between man and creature. The
Pedestrian (1951) In a dystopian future where people have become
antisocial and isolated, one man takes a solitary walk at night, leading
to an encounter with the authorities. There Will Come Soft Rains (1950)
This story depicts the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse through the
perspective of an automated house that continues its routine despite the
absence of its human inhabitants. The Illustrated Man (1951) The
titular story introduces a man whose tattoos come to life, each telling a
different tale that explores various aspects of human nature and
society. All Summer in a Day (1954) Set on Venus, where the sun appears
for only a few hours every seven years, this story explores the cruelty
of children and the consequences of their actions. The Small Assassin
(1946) In this early Bradbury story, a mother becomes increasingly
convinced that her newborn baby is trying to harm her. Kaleidoscope
(1949) A group of astronauts hurtles through space after their rocket
explodes, and the story explores their thoughts and reflections as they
face impending doom.
These short stories showcase Bradbury's
masterful storytelling, imagination, and his ability to blend elements
of science fiction with poignant reflections on human nature and
society.
Fahrenheit 451
Nearly
Seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s
internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of
world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has
grown more relevant than ever before.
Guy Montag is a fireman.
His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book,
along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions
the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his
bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television
“family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who
introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a
present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of
the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything
he has ever known.
The classic dystopian novel of a
post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwell’s 1984 and
Huxley’s Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western
civilization’s enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.
Bradbury’s
powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the
potential of technology to create a novel which, decades on from first
publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
Dandelion Wine - Green Town Series Book 1
The
summer of '28 was a vintage season for a growing boy. A summer of green
apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers,
of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. It was a
summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless
summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding
remembered forever by the incomparable Ray Bradbury.
Woven into
the novel are the following short stories: Illumination, Dandelion Wine,
Summer in the Air, Season of Sitting, The Happiness Machine, The Night,
The Lawns of Summer, Season of Disbelief, The Last the Very Last, The
Green Machine, The Trolley, Statues, The Window, The Swan, The Whole
Town's Sleeping, Goodbye Grandma, The Tarot Witch, Hotter Than Summer,
Dinner at Dawn, The Magical Kitchen, Green Wine for Dreaming.
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Green Town Series Book 2
One
of Ray Bradbury’s best-known and most popular novels, Something Wicked
This Way Comes, now featuring a new introduction and material about its
longstanding influence on culture and genre.
For those who still
dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of
its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger &
Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to
destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The
carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week
early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive
promise of dreams and youth regained. Two boys will discover the secret
of its smoke, mazes, and mirrors; two friends who will soon know all too
well the heavy cost of wishes…and the stuff of nightmares.
Few
novels have endured in the heart and memory as has Ray Bradbury’s
unparalleled literary masterpiece Something Wicked This Way Comes. Scary
and suspenseful, it is a timeless classic in the American canon.
The Martian Chronicles
The
strange and wonderful tale of man’s experiences on Mars, filled with
intense images and astonishing visions. Now part of the Voyager Classics
collection.
The Martian Chronicles tells the story of humanity’s
repeated attempts to colonize the red planet. The first men were few.
Most succumbed to a disease they called the Great Loneliness when they
saw their home planet dwindle to the size of a fist. They felt they had
never been born. Those few that survived found no welcome on Mars. The
shape-changing Martians thought they were native lunatics and duly
locked them up.
But more rockets arrived from Earth, and more,
piercing the hallucinations projected by the Martians. People brought
their old prejudices with them and their desires and fantasies, tainted
dreams. These were soon inhabited by the strange native beings, with
their caged flowers and birds of flame.
The Earthmen came by the
handful, then the hundreds, then the millions. They swept aside the
majestic, dying Martian civilization to build their homes, shopping
malls, and cities. Mars began as a place of boundless hopes and dreams, a
planet to replace an Earth sinking into waste and war. It became a
canvas for mankind’s follies and darkest desires. Ultimately, the
Earthmen who came to conquer the red-gold planet awoke to discover
themselves conquered by Mars. Lulled by its ancient enchantments, the
Earthmen learned, at terrible cost, to overcome their own humanity.
The Martian Chronicles include:
Rocket Summer
Ylla
The Summer Night
The Earth Men
The Taxpayer
The Third Expedition
And the Moon Be Still As Bright
The Settlers
The Green Morning
The Locusts
Night Meeting
The Shore
Interim
The Musicians
Way in the Middle of the Air
The Naming of Names
Usher II
The Old Ones
The Martian
The Luggage Store
The Off Season
The Watchers
The Silent Towns
The Long Years
There Will Come Soft Rains
The Million Year Picnic
From The Dust Returned
Ray
Bradbury, America's most beloved storyteller, has spent a lifetime
carrying readers to exhilarating and dangerous places, from dark street
comers in unfamiliar cities and towns to the edge of the universe. Now,
in an extraordinary flight of the imagination a half-century in the
making, he takes us to a most wondrous destination: into the heart of an
Eternal Family.
They have lived for centuries in a house of
legend and mystery in upper Illinois and they are not like other
midwesterners. Rarely encountered in daylight hours, their children are
curious and wild; their old ones have survived since before the Sphinx
first sank its paws deep in Egyptian sands. And some sleep in beds with
lids.
Now the house is being readied in anticipation of the gala
homecoming that will gather together the farflung branches of this odd
and remarkable family. In the past-midnight stillness can be detected
the soft fluttering of Uncle Einars wings. From her realm of sleep,
Cecy, the fairest and most special daughter, can feel the approach of
many a welcome being shapeshifter, telepath, somnambulist, vampire as
she flies high in the consciousness of bird and bat.
But in the
midst of eager anticipation, a sense of doom pervades. For the world is
changing. And death, no stranger, will always shadow this most singular
family: Father, arisen from the Earth; Mother, who never sleeps but
dreams; A Thousand Times Great Grandmére; Grandfather, who keeps the
wildness of youth between his ears.
And the boy who, more than
anyone, carries the burden of time on his shoulders: Timothy, the sad
and different foundling son who must share it all, remember, and tell...
and who, alone out of all of them, must one day age and wither and die.
By
turns lyrical, wistful, poignant, and chilling, From the Dust Returned
is the long-awaited new novel by the peerless Ray Bradbury a book that
will surely be numbered among his most enduring masterworks.
Death is a Lonely Business
Ray
Bradbury, the undisputed Dean of American storytelling, dips his
accomplished pen into the cryptic inkwell of noir and creates a stylish
and slightly fantastical tale of mayhem and murder set among the shadows
and the murky canals of Venice, California, in the early 1950s.
Toiling
away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling
young writer (who bears a resemblance to the author) spins fantastic
stories from his fertile imagination upon his clacking typewriter.
Trying not to miss his girlfriend (away studying in Mexico), the
nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort until strange things
begin happening around him.
Starting with a series of peculiar
phone calls, the writer then finds clumps of seaweed on his doorstep.
But as the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of
mysterious "accidents" some of them fatal. Aided by Elmo Crumley, a
savvy, street-smart detective, and a reclusive actress of yesteryear
with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the
connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the
truth about his own creative abilities.
Quicker Than the Eye
The
internationally acclaimed author of The Martian Chronicles, The
Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury is a magician at the
height of his powers, displaying his sorcerer's skill with twenty-one
remarkable stories that run the gamut from total reality to light
fantastic, from high noon to long after midnight. A true master tells
all, revealing the strange secret of growing young and mad; opening a
Witch Door that links two intolerant centuries; joining an ancient
couple in their wild assassination games; celebrating life and dreams in
the unique voice that has favored him across six decades and has
enchanted millions of readers the world over.
Quicker Than the Eye includes:
Unterderseaboat Doktor
Zaharoff/Richter Mark V
Remember Sascha?
Another Fine Mess
The Electrocution
Hopscotch
The Finnegan
That Woman on the Lawn
The Very Gentle Murders
Quicker Than the Eye
Dorian in Excelsis
No News, or What Killed the Dog?
The Witch Door
The Ghost in the Machine
At the End of the Ninth Year
Bug
Once More, Legato
Exchange
Free Dirt
Last Rites
The Other Highway
Make Haste to Live: An Afterword
Source and additional information: Ray Bradbury