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Name : Ray Douglas Bradbury, known as Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)
Nationality : American
Famous for ... : Author and screenwriter = one of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers
Genres he worked in ... : fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction
Most famous works : The Martian Chronicles (1950), Farenheit 451 (1953) = Many of his works were adapted to comic book, television, and film formats
"The writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream", the New York Times, 2012
His mother, Esther Moberg, was a Swedish immigrant and his father was of English descent. Ray Bradbury came from a large family and one of his aunts often read bedtime stories to him, which greatly impressed the little boy and fed his imagination.
When Bradbury was 14 years old, his family settled in Los Angeles and he often went roller-skating through Hollywood, hoping to meet some of the celebrities who lived there. A few weeks after his arrival, he met a radio star who offered him his first job as a writer for his show !
In fact, Bradbury was only 11 when he started writing his first stories.
He loved reading too and spent long hours in libraries. His favourite authors were HG Wells, Jules Vernes and Edgar Allan Poe. He was also keen on drawing and doing magic.
At age 16, he attended his first meeting of the LA Science Fiction Society where he met science fiction writers. Two years later, he published his first story in a fanzine. Soon afterwards, he began writing his first fanzine, entitled ‘Futuria Fantasia’ and also contributed to Script, a film magazine. Because of his bad eyesight, he was rejected from the army so he had plenty of time to write and even act in several plays. By the age of 24, Bradbury had become a full-time writer.
Ray Bradbury was married to Marguerite McClure, the only woman he had ever dated. They had four daughters together.
He died in Los Angeles, California, on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91, nine years after his beloved wife.
Why didn’t Ray Bradbury regard himself as a ‘true’ science fiction writer ?
First he claimed a wide variety of influences, including authors like Shakespeare, John Steinbeck and Thomas Wolfe, known as one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction.
Secondly, in his eyes, science fiction was ‘the art of the possible’. He once said : « 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. »
This implies that the future he depicted in the 1950s was likely to become
today’s reality.
Is it the case ? It is, indeed. Some short stories like ‘The Veldt’, which was
originally entitled ‘The World the Children Made’ in in the 23 September
1950 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, raise many issues we are facing
today. It is all the more remarkable when you think that when Bradbury
was born in 1920, ‘the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV
didn’t exist’. (Ray Bradbury, 2000)