SOME WORKS CONTAINING BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Although no biography of Ray Bradbury, as biography is conventionally understood, has been published, one important biographical source where any discussion of Bradbury’s life must begin is The Ray Bradbury Companion by William F. Nolan. The subtitle of this 1975 work explains its purpose: A Life and Career History, Photolog, and Comprehensive Checklist of Writings with Facsimiles from Ray Bradbury’s Unpublished and Uncollected Work in All Media. Nolan, a long-time friend of Bradbury, provides a chronological listing of important dates and events, a treasure of photographs and facsimiles, and a comprehensive checklist of Bradbury’s writings to that time. The checklist is organized by genre and arranged chronologically.

The fact that Bradbury’s own introduction, Nolan’s preface, the photographs, and the chronology of Bradbury’s life take up only ninety-six pages of a book that is over 320 pages long reveals the extent to which writing makes up a huge part of Bradbury’s life. Bradbury’s advice to writers to write every day is based on his own experience, since he has always written for hours every day. In the introduction to Nolan’s book, Bradbury lists writing as one of his grand passions. Bradbury’s identification of his passions also makes it clear that his writing is connected to what he loves: his self-described “obsessions with Space, with magic, with Dracula at midnight and Frankenstein at noon” (Nolan 5).

The other place for readers to search for information on Bradbury’s life is in his collections, novels, and other published work. Such information is found in two places: in introductions or afterwards to his fiction and within the stories or novels themselves. In later editions of his fiction, Bradbury provides introductions written sometimes decades after original publication (when the original publishers probably scorned the idea of introductions by mere science fiction writers). These introductions often talk about his writing process and his life. Several of these introductions, along with other essays, have been collected in Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius within You, Bradbury’s 1990 book of advice for writers.

Another place to find information about the writer’s life, although readers must approach this source with care, is at the heart of the stories themselves. Of special interest are those works Mogen calls “autobiographical fantasies,” in which Bradbury explores and recreates his memories of his childhood and young adulthood. Since Bradbury, as a writer, makes it clear that a great deal of his writing is based to some extent on his own life, an understanding of his life can aid readers in thinking about the writing. However, readers must be careful not to assume a one-to-one relationship between the life of the writer and the fictional work. As Mogen points out, Bradbury alters “the actual facts of his life,” often to emphasize a greater connection with “American experience in general” (Mogen 114). One example of alteration Mogen gives is how Bradbury, who was eight in 1928, makes the character of Doug Spaulding twelve in 1928 in order to link the protagonist’s growing maturity with the country’s economic crash in Dandelion Wine.

In a more extended discussion, Wayne L. Johnson, author of the other book on Bradbury’s work, describes how Waukegan, where Bradbury was born and lived as a child, was altered in Bradbury’s fictional Green Town. The “houses have been romanticized and embellished in the Green Town stories,” so that readers who visit Waukegan and expect to see “stately, Victorian style structures, replete with turret-like cupolas and bristling with wrought-iron lightning rods” will be disappointed. The reality is “modest, unadorned frame buildings” (Johnson 90). The ravine, however, more than lives up to the image that Bradbury creates. Johnson argues that “Green Town represents a distillation of Bradbury’s experience,” a location where Bradbury is free to explore “people, places, and happenings” in ways that could never happen in real life (Johnson 91).

Ray Bradbury and the Question of “Science Fiction”

The question of what genre, or genres, Ray Bradbury writes in is a complicated one to answer. A. James Stupple, an academic critic writing in the 1980 Greenberg and Olander anthology, declares that “Bradbury is primarily a science fiction writer” (Stupple “The Past” 30). However, in his 1980 essay, “The Fiction of Ray Bradbury: Universal Themes in Mid-western Settings,” Thomas P. Linkfield, an academic critic, claims that, “although most people [associate] Ray Bradbury’s name with science fiction, due to the success of The Martian Chronicles and other stories dealing with space, a large proportion of his work has nothing whatsoever to do with either space or science fiction” (Linkfield 94).

Another academic critic distinguishes Bradbury from other writers of science fiction. Calvin Miller, in “Ray Bradbury: Hope in a Doubtful Age,” argues that Bradbury is a science fiction writer who is better (less silly) than the other science fiction writers. Reading Bradbury, Miller reports that instead of “ray guns, interplanetary wars, and glass-domed demons,” he found “real people and circumstances which, while only mildly scientific, soared far above what I expected from science fiction,” and which included an “enthralling sense of cosmic spirituality” (Miller 93).

Ultimately, the question of genre depends on what Bradbury works the critic reads. Wayne L. Johnson, in his 1980 book Ray Bradbury, arranges his chapters around important themes he finds in Bradbury’s work: “Medicines for Melancholy,” “The Pandemonium Shadow Show,” “Future Imperfect,” “Machineries of Joy and Sorrow,” “Green Town, Illinois,” “Mars,” “Other Themes,” and “Other Works.” David Mogen, in his 1986 book also titled Ray Bradbury, focuses individual chapters on Bradbury’s pulp magazine publication, “weird tales,” space colonization fiction, The Martian Chronicles, future warning tales about technology, autobiographical fantasy, realist fiction, and detective fiction, and finishes with a portmanteau chapter focusing on Bradbury’s work in film, drama, and poetry.

Bradbury himself addresses the question of whether or not he writes “science fiction” in various places. In the introduction he wrote for The Ray Bradbury Companion, he discusses how hard it is for readers born during or after the 1950s to understand what it was like in 1949: “We so-called science fiction writers have always had doubts about that rather dubious label. Mainly because gangs of intellectual apes have clubbed us for a full lifetime, and when they weren’t beating us were busily ignoring us…. Naturally, most of us grew up with at least a twinge of self-doubt and inferiority” (Nolan 7). Bradbury eloquently describes the marginalization of science fiction readers and writers in the years before the first manned flight to the Moon, which occurred in 1969. That flight, the reality of which made the “fantasies” science fiction had written about for decades exist, changed many people’s perception of science fiction.

He also discusses the problem of “science fiction” as a marketing label. When The Martian Chronicles was published by Doubleday, the phrase “Doubleday Science Fiction” appeared on the front and back cover. Bradbury notes that this labelling meant “instant neglect for any book so published, so weighted down and intellectually wounded” (Nolan 8) — referring here to critical neglect, the attention of reviewers and academics, not necessarily neglect by readers. In his essay, “Dusk in the Robot Museums: The Rebirth of the Imagination,” included in his Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury writes with glee of the way children led the way to change. In this 1980 praise song for science fiction as the literature of ideas, the “Double Revolution in reading, in teaching Literature and pictorial Art,” Bradbury claims that the young have raised the flag against the snobbish intellectuals who deride science fiction as popular and thus unworthy of reading (97–107).

The definition of science fiction and the status of this genre, not to mention its ever-growing manifestations in other media such as films and computer games, have changed dramatically in the fifty-plus years since Bradbury published his first novel. However, Bradbury’s work has never gone out of fashion: a new computer game based on The Martian Chronicles has recently been released.

Bradbury has been active in science fiction fandom, including publishing his own fanzine and attending conventions. In 1952, Bradbury attended “Westercon,” a west coast science fiction convention, as the guest of honor, and was elected president of a new group, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (Nolan 59). As Bradbury’s work makes clear, he had more problems with the label of science fiction, and perhaps with people’s narrow definition of the genre, than with the freedoms the genre afforded him as a writer. He has included fantastic elements in his work written in other genres, apparently enjoying confounding the critics by mixing genre conventions.

Debate over whether Bradbury should be called a science fiction writer hinges on the various definitions of science fiction, which range from an insistence on careful extrapolation from contemporaneous scientific knowledge to a casual assumption that anything with space ships qualifies as science fiction, as well as the changing sociocultural world in which Bradbury as well as his critics and readers live. The most sustained analysis of Bradbury’s changing status is found in Mogen’s book, the second chapter of which is titled “Bradbury and the Critics: Between Two Worlds.” Mogen traces how Bradbury moved from a genre writer publishing solely in pulp magazines to attaining the mainstream status that he continues to hold today. His popularity, shown by the fact that most of his work has remained in print for decades, has been accompanied by a growing reputation among academic critics.

Mogen notes the paradoxical and controversial history of responses to Bradbury, including the idea that “the most severe criticism of his work has come from the science-fiction community rather than from the mainstream literary establishment. Though he may be the world’s best-known science-fiction personality, Bradbury’s reputation within the science fiction community itself has always been ambivalent” (Mogen 14). Mogen quotes the 1978 Reader’s Guide to Science Fiction, whose editors characterized Bradbury as a “bit of a problem,” noting (like Mogen) the different perceptions of Bradbury held by readers, critics, and the science fiction community. This reference work repeats a common criticism of Bradbury’s work: that it is “anti-science fiction.”

According to Mogen, Bradbury’s movement into mainstream publication was marked by more numerous reviews by mainstream writers and reviewers and by increasing sales to the “slick” mainstream magazines, so called because of the quality of their paper, in contrast to the cheaper paper used in the smaller “pulp” magazines. Unfortunately, the mainstream critical praise of Bradbury often involved insulting the quality of all other science fiction, which in turn provoked hostile responses from science fiction writers and critics. Bradbury’s success might have indicated the possibility of similar success for other science fiction writers, but some science fiction critics did not appreciate science fiction being defined for mainstream audiences by one writer’s work, especially when that work was perceived by some science fiction writers and critics to be non-representative of much of the work published in the genre.

Mogen describes how some writers wanted to define science fiction by criteria established by John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction during the 1940s and 1950s, a period often called the golden age of science fiction. The key element of good science fiction, according to Campbell, is a world plausibly extrapolated from, and not contradicting, contemporary scientific knowledge and principles. Science fiction that follows Campbell’s principles is sometimes called “hard science fiction” to distinguish it from other subgenres of science fiction such as horror, fantasy, space opera, or science fantasy. Bradbury has “violated” and continues to violate the standards of hard science fiction because he is interested in other ways of writing about the world, the universe, and the human condition.

After summarizing the various debates about Bradbury’s status, Mogen provides a “defense.” He notes that an examination of Bradbury’s work as a whole proves he is not simply against science and technology, but is part of an important science fiction tradition that includes writers such as H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Frederick Pohl, and Ursula K. Le Guin, who “warn about consequences of misusing the new powers” (Mogen 22) and who question the belief that technology always improves life. Mogen argues that Bradbury, as a writer, enjoys contradictions and confounding people: While Bradbury may be against cars, airplanes, telephones, and television, he is a passionate advocate of trains, rockets, movies, radio drama, and comic strips. Mogen argues that while Bradbury’s work might not include “the detailed extrapolative dimension and the no-nonsense, world-conquering ethos many science-fiction readers value,” part of the problem is caused by “limitations in the aesthetic principles applied by reviewers and critics in the science-fiction field” (Mogen 24).

A further development in the reception of Bradbury’s work came about in the 1960s, when Bradbury’s work began appearing in literary anthologies published for use in public schools. In 1968, College English included a critical study of Fahrenheit 451, initiating the growth of academic critical scholarship devoted to Bradbury (Nolan 67). Bradbury notes the nature of this change when he argues that children’s love for science fiction and the social revolution of the 1960s led to a more inclusive curriculum that resulted in high schools and colleges teaching more science fiction (Nolan 9). Bringing Bradbury into the schools, Mogen argues, led critics to focus on the artistry of Bradbury’s science fiction and the speculative nature and themes of his work, rather than how well the stories met the criteria of scientific extrapolation.

Other academic critics have begun to show the ways in which Bradbury’s work is part of an American literary tradition. Mortin I. Teicher, in “Ray Bradbury and Thomas Wolfe: Fantasy and the Fantastic,” analyzes the extent to which Bradbury connects his work to reality by incorporating writers as characters into his stories, including Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Shakespeare, and, especially, Thomas Wolfe (Teicher 17). Academic critic Steven Kagle, in “Homage to Melville: Ray Bradbury and the Nineteenth-Century American Romance,” situates Bradbury’s work firmly in the genre of prose romance: “When we finally try to categorize Ray Bradbury’s place as a writer, we will ultimately place him beside Herman Melville and Stephen King rather than Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke” (Kagle 279). Kagle argues against working with the popular concept of science fiction (future events set in space), or with Campbell’s definition of science fiction as fiction based on extrapolation from known scientific facts. Since Bradbury grew up reading the pulp magazines before those standards were established, what he came to write was “science fantasy,” a genre that looks back to a literary tradition that differs from the realistic novel. Kagle places Bradbury in that nineteenth-century tradition, that of Melville and Hawthorne, rather than in the twentieth-century science fiction tradition, since his fiction “does not attempt to adhere to either the scientific or psychological laws of our world” (Kagle 285).

Hazel Pierce, an academic critic, in “Ray Bradbury and the Gothic Tradition,” also takes this perspective, arguing that much of Bradbury’s work can be understood by studying the conventions of literary genres other than twentieth-century science fiction. She warns that it is dangerous to try to “connect a contemporary author with any established literary tradition” because it is difficult to tell how much of a work is attributable to the influence of the source or genre traditions and what is original from the author (Pierce 165). She quotes Bradbury in an interview where he was posed an either-or question: Do authors invent ideas or “tap” sources? Bradbury presented a synthesis: he sees the “author’s purpose [as finding] fresh ways of presenting basic truths” (Pierce 165). Pierce analyzes three of his books (The October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Halloween Tree) as examples of Bradbury working within the gothic tradition while simultaneously changing it.

The gothic novel originated in Europe and was revived in the eighteenth century, appearing in architecture as well as literature, which was even then considered “popular” in the derogatory sense. Specifically, the literature was seen as appealing to the common people, the lower class, rather than the intellectual or social elites. Gothic literary conventions include historical settings, particularly castles or churches, and hauntings. Female writers refined the gothic heroine, a virtuous female victim often threatened by erotic decadence. In America, Hawthorne and Poe translated some of the conventions to a fresh setting, blending in more horror (Pierce 167–169). Pierce argues that Poe is the link between Bradbury and the gothic tradition, which depends on such themes as fear of the unknown and the balance between good and evil shown in terms of light and dark.

Pierce examines how Bradbury has used some of the conventions of the gothic while adding his own ideas. For example, Bradbury’s stories tend to show innocent young boys rather than women. The light–dark polarity is maintained, as well as the sense of landscape, the “October Country” so familiar to Bradbury’s readers. Supernatural elements (Tom Fury, the carnival people in Something Wicked This Way Comes), storms, and a kind of “American castle” — the public library — all appear in Bradbury’s work, resulting in a new blend of “ancient” and “modern” conventions (Pierce 185).

Bradbury has recently begun publishing novels that blend the conventions of mystery, horror, and suspense with fantastic elements, all drawing on events from his own life as a young writer: Death Is a Lonely Business and A Graveyard for Lunatics. In these novels, Bradbury uses conventions from the mystery and horror genres, but his fantastic and autobiographical elements tend to result in work that critics do not usually categorize as mystery. Additionally, the problem of marketing still exists: copies of these novels are usually found in science fiction sections of bookstores, not in the mystery sections. Despite his complaints, Bradbury’s works will probably continue to be shelved in the science fiction sections of bookstores for some time.

Regardless of how critics — or booksellers — categorize Bradbury’s work, or whatever part of it they are choosing to examine, they all agree on the extent to which Bradbury’s style identifies him. His style exhibits a lyricism that is sometimes his strength, sometimes his weakness. His lyricism is sometimes evocative, powerful and chilling, and other times it is overstated or overly sentimental. Sarah-Warner J. Pell, one of several academic critics who have written on Bradbury’s style, has analyzed the imagery in Bradbury’s fiction, and Donald Watt analyzes the symbolism in Fahrenheit 451 (Greenberg and Olander). Mogen also analyzes the influences on Bradbury’s style, tracing both the pulp and literary influences, how he moved from imitating the writers around him to develop a “poetry of the unconscious” by focusing on recovering personal memories, and how voracious reading (American literature, Shakespeare, women writers) has shaped his work as well. Mogen also notes the extent to which Bradbury’s device of creating asides within his stories (the poetic, metaphorical descriptions that interrupt plots) became a major aspect of his work (Mogen 38–39). The asides, the climactic descriptive moments that often establish major themes, are often what stay in readers’ minds.

William F. Touponce, in Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie, analyzes Bradbury’s work in the context of phenomenology, a philosophy that “takes as its starting point the world as experienced in our consciousness” (Hawthorn 148). Touponce’s ambitious analysis (recently issued in a second edition) starts by assuming the importance of the aesthetic experience with regard to fantasy and science fiction and argues for the importance of Bradbury’s use of reverie — daydreams, asides, evocations of memory, and imagination. Touponce’s extended and complex reading focuses on the relation between Bradbury’s style, the use of reverie, and the magical or fantastic aspects of the work.

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