The Life of Ray Bradbury

Lecture 1

(August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)

Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American mainstream, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, a town he would later fictionalize as Green Town in numerous stories and several novels. His father, Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, worked as a telephone lineman. His mother was Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury. Bradbury had older twin brothers, Leonard and Samuel, who were born in 1916, and a younger sister, Elizabeth, born in 1926. His brother Samuel died in 1918, and his sister in 1927 (Nolan 39–40).

Bradbury has described his childhood in detail, claiming total recall from birth on. Seeing Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame at the age of three profoundly affected him. Memories and images of Chaney as Quasimodo, a deformed man perceived as a monster, strongly inform A Graveyard for Lunatics, Bradbury’s novel about being a screenwriter in Hollywood. Other childhood passions included “Douglas Fairbanks, Edgar Allan Poe when [he] was eight, Buck Rogers at nine, Tarzan at ten, and all the science fiction magazines from these same years” (Nolan 5). David Mogen, the author of one of the two scholarly monographs on Bradbury’s work, argues that Bradbury’s “immersion in popular culture” from an early age grew to include a wide variety of media, including “books, comics, movies, theater, museums, magic-shows, circuses,” all of which shaped him as a writer (Mogen 2).

Because of ongoing work and economic problems, the Bradbury family moved often, from Waukegan to Arizona and back in 1926–27 and 1932–33, then to Los Angeles in 1934 (Nolan 43). The family stayed in California long enough for Bradbury to enter Los Angeles High School, where he was active in the drama club and took writing courses (Nolan 45). Bradbury’s early interest in acting, which he almost chose as a career, has remained strong throughout his life. He began publishing poetry, short stories, and articles during his high school years. After graduating in 1938, Bradbury continued to live with his family, selling newspapers for ten dollars a week (Nolan 52).

Bradbury’s love for both his hometowns, Waukegan (Green Town) and Los Angeles (depicted in Death Is a Lonely Business and A Graveyard for Lunatics as energetic and creative), comes through in his writing. However, Mogen cites one of Bradbury’s stories as well as personal interviews to show that Bradbury’s own adolescence was difficult: he wore glasses and was teased by his peers, and found solace in his love for movies. He sought out stars, rollerskating ten miles to the studio to get their autographs (Mogen 5), a story he also tells about his teenage self in A Graveyard for Lunatics.

During high school and after, Bradbury was an active science fiction fan, joining the Los Angeles Science Fiction League, where he met Forrest Ackerman, Henry Kuttner, and Ray Harryhausen. All three of these men merit entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction for their contributions to the genre: Ackerman published widely in the fan journals and worked as an editor and agent (Clute 3). Kuttner was a writer who published in Weird Tales (as would Bradbury) and who later wrote science fiction, publishing under a number of pseudonyms and often collaborating with his wife, C. L. Moore (Clute 682). Ray Harryhausen, the basis for the character of Roy Holdstrom in A Graveyard for Lunatics, created special effects for a number of science fiction and fantasy movies such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and One Million Years B.C. (1960) (Clute 548).

Bradbury was active in the “fandom” subculture, groups of science fiction fans who began organizing and publishing amateur magazines known as fanzines. Fandom originated in the late 1920s and grew during the 1940s (Clute 402). Fan groups were the first to organize conventions where writers, editors, and fans could meet to talk about science fiction. Science fiction in America has been characterized by a closeness between writers and their fans, with many fans eventually becoming writers. Bradbury’s interest in science fiction led to problems at school, including being “the only student in the fiction class who did not get a story printed in the high school short stories anthologies” because he wrote science fiction (Mogen 6).

Bradbury followed the well-trod path from fan to writer: he published stories, cartoons, and columns in other people’s fanzines, then began publishing his own mimeographed fanzine in 1939, putting out four issues of Futuria Fantasia (Clute 151). He attended the first World Science Fiction Convention, held in New York in 1939. In 1940, Bradbury met Robert Heinlein and attended one of his writing classes. Heinlein is one of the best-known science fiction writers, and is considered one of the major forces in the field from 1940 to 1960 (Clute 554). In 1941, Bradbury met Leigh Brackett, who started to work regularly with him on his stories. Brackett wrote fantasy, science fiction, and mysteries, publishing stories and novels and writing screenplays as well (Clute 150). Bradbury wrote fifty-two stories during 1941 and sold three of them. During that year, he decided to choose writing, rather than acting, as his full-time career, and within a year was able to give up selling newspapers because of the money he made from selling stories (Nolan 52–54).

For his writing Bradbury rented a room in a Los Angeles tenement building. The room and the friends he made during that time serve as the basis for the building and characters described in Death Is a Lonely Business, and inspired several of his short stories about Mexican Americans. Because of vision problems, Bradbury could not serve during World War II, but he wrote material for the Red Cross and the Civil Defense.

Bradbury met his future wife Marguerite Susan McClure (1922-2003) in a bookstore in 1946. They began dating, and married in 1947. Between 1949 and 1958, they had four daughters: Susan Marguerite, Ramona Anne, Bettina Francion, and Alexandra Allison. Bradbury continued to support his family through his writing, becoming the only science fiction writer of this period to break into the higher-paying “slick” magazines. As he notes in Zen in the Art of Writing, the pulps paid from twenty to forty dollars a story; the sale of forty stories in 1944 earned him eight hundred dollars (68).

Bradbury also wrote and sold mystery and suspense stories, as well as science fiction and horror or “weird” tales. His stories began winning awards outside the science fiction or mystery fields. Bradbury’s fiction continued to win literary prizes and anthology publication, and he eventually decided not to write for the cheaper pulp magazines anymore. The late 1940s and 1950s were when much of his best-known work was written and published: The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Dandelion Wine (1957). Several collections of his short stories appeared during the 1950s as well. Bradbury’s earliest published work (during the ’40s) was highly successful within the genre publications that were read by science fiction and horror fans. His breakthrough to mainstream popularity occurred in 1950 after Christopher Isherwood, a writer and mainstream literary critic, wrote a favorable review of The Martian Chronicles, considered by many to be Bradbury’s greatest achievement (Mogen 15; Clute 151).

Bradbury also worked on movie scripts. His first movie job was at Universal Studios, where he produced a 110-page film treatment that was made into the first 3-D science fiction movie, It Came from Outer Space (Nolan 59). In 1953, director John Huston asked him to write the script for Moby Dick, a project that took Bradbury and his family to Ireland for seven months (and which provided him with material for short stories and a novel, Green Shadows, White Whale) (Nolan 60). His script-writing experiences form the basis of A Graveyard for Lunatics. He has continued to write scripts for dramatic and television production, with recent adaptations of his stories appearing on the syndicated television series Ray Bradbury Theatre (May 1985–October 1992).

In the 1990s Bradbury continued to write fiction, but he also wrote plays, screenplays, and poetry, as well as a book on creative writing and numerous essays. This remarkable outpouring of creative work (which continues to this day) owes much to Bradbury’s habit of writing every day, without fail. He has also served as a creative consultant for the World’s Fair and for Disney World, designing part of the United States Pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair and Spaceship Earth for the Epcot Center (Bradbury Zen 64).

Bradbury’s popularity with readers has only grown over the years. In his 1986 study, Mogen claims that more than “four million copies of The Martian Chronicles have...been sold, and Bradbury has become the world’s most widely anthologized author, with selections in over 1200 anthologies” (Mogen 13). Nolan lists languages Bradbury’s work has been translated into, with a photograph showing twenty-seven foreign-language editions of The Martian Chronicles (Nolan 112).

Bradbury received numerous awards and honors. Besides the awards won by individual short stories and novels, he was also honored for his career as a whole. In 1977, Bradbury was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, given annually at the World Fantasy Convention. In 1988, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (the major professional association of such writers) awarded Bradbury their Grand Master Nebula Award. The Horror Writers Association (another professional writers’ group) awarded Bradbury their major award, the Bram Stoker Award, in three categories in 1989: for a fiction collection (The Toynbee Convector), for a short story (“The Thing at the Top of the Stairs”), and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. Other awards include an Emmy for his teleplay of “The Halloween Tree” and an Oscar nomination for his 1962 animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright (Johnston and Jepson; Clute). Two tributes not made by organizations also show Bradbury’s broad influence. The first is the 1991 anthology created by writers who set stories in Bradbury’s settings, The Bradbury Chronicles: Stories in Honor of Ray Bradbury, edited by William F. Nolan and Martin H. Greenberg (Clute 153). The second tribute came in 1971, when the Apollo 15 crew named a lunar feature Dandelion Crater in honor of Bradbury’s work (Nolan 69). In 1992 an asteroid was named in his honor (9766 Bradbury). Bradbury was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, presented by then-President George and Laura Bush in 2004. In 2007 the writer received an award (a special citation) from The Pulitzer Board. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Ray Bradbury was given a star on the Holywood Walk of Fame. In 2007 Bradbury received the French Commandeur Ordre des Arts et Lettres medal. In 2008, he was named SFPA (Science Fiction Poetry Association) Grandmaster.

Bradbury currently lived in Los Angeles, wrote every day, and habitually worked on several projects at a time. He lectured on a regular basis, but was primarily focused on keeping a regular writing schedule.

Bradbury died in Los Angeles, California, on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91, after a lengthy illness.

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