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Ray Douglas Bradbury

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  Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22, 1920. He was the third son of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury. When he was six years old, in the fall of 1926, the Bradbury family moved to Tuscon, Arizona, but returned to Waukegan again in May of 1927.  By the time Bradbury was eleven, he was writing stories his own stories on butcher paper. In 1932, when his father was laid off from his job as a telephone lineman, the family once again moved to Tuscon and then again returned to Waukegan the following year. In 1934, the family moved again. This time it was to Los Angeles, CA. Bradbury graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938 and that was where his formal education ended. But that's not where he stopped learning. During the day he would be at the typewriter and at night he would be in the library. He also supported himself by selling newspapers on Los Angeles street corners from 1938 till 1942.

  Bradbury's first published story was "Hollerbochen's Dilemma," printed in Imagination!, an amateur fan magazine, in 1938. In 1939, Bradbury published 4 issues of Futuria Fantasia, his own fan magazine, to which he contributed much other published material. Bradbury first paid publication was in 1941, for "Pendulum" which was published in Super Science Stories. In 1942, Bradbury wrote "The Lake" and it was with this story that he discovered his own distinctive writing style. By 1943, he gave up his job selling newspapers and began writing full time. He contributed many short stories to periodicals. In 1945, his short story, "The Big Black and White Game" was selected for Best American Short Stories. In 1947, Bradbury married Marguerite McClure. Also that year, he published his first short story collection, titled Dark Carnival (published in England under the name The Small Assassin).

  After the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, a book about the first attempt at colonizing Mars by humans, Ray Bradbury started to gain a reputation as a very good writer in the science fiction field. His next work was The Illustrated Man, followed by Fahrenheit 451 in 1953. Fahrenheit 451, about the censorship of books in a future totalitarian society, is one of Bradbury's best known works. During the time Ray wrote these books, he was also a writer for the Alfred Hitcock Presents and The Twilight Zone shows. He wrote for these shows for several years. Also in 1953, he did the screenplay for John Huston's Moby . Bradbury has also produced two of his own plays, written two space-age cantatas with Lalo Schifrin and Jerry Goldsmith, as well as two musicals. He collaborated on an animated film, titled Icarus Montgolfer Wright, about the history of flight, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1962.

  In addition to all that, Bradbury was Idea Consultant for the U.S. Pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1963. He helped design the Orbitron space ride at Euro-Disney, and conceived the metaphors for Spaceship Earth, at EPCOT center in Disney World. He is also currently doing consultant work on city engineering and rapid transit. Bradbury has earned many other achievements. These include the the Benjamin Franklin Award in 1954, O. Henry Memorial Award, the Aviation-Space Writer's Association Award for best space article in an American Magazine in 1967, the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, and the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America and his work has been included in the Best American Short Story collections (1946, 1948, and 1952). Perhaps one of his strangest achievements is when on of the Apollo astronauts named a crater on the moon Dandelion Crater to honor Bradbury's novel Dandelion Wine. His novel Something Wicked This Way Comes was made into a major release feature film and his own cable television show, called the Ray Bradbury Theater, has received 19 cable award nominations and has won seven. He was creative consultant for the Jon Jerde Partnership, the architectural firm that blueprinted the Glendale Galleria, The Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles, and Horton Plaza in San Diego, CA.

  With all these achievements, we really couldn't build a site about classics without a page for Ray Bradbury. To date, Bradbury is still actively working- at writing and lecturing, among other things.

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