Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter whose work ranged across science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and literary fiction. Born August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, and died June 5, 2012, in Los Angeles, California, he published more than 30 books and close to 600 short stories over a career spanning seven decades. Bradbury's family moved to Los Angeles in 1934, where he graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1938. Lacking the means to attend college, he educated himself at the public library, a place he credited throughout his life with shaping his imagination. He sold newspapers on Los Angeles street corners while writing in the basement of the central library, and published his first professional short story in 1941. "The Martian Chronicles" (1950) collected his linked stories of human colonization of Mars into a single mosaic novel and brought him broad recognition. "The Illustrated Man" (1951) gathered eighteen stories framed by the conceit of a tattooed drifter whose ink figures come to life. "Fahrenheit 451" (1953), his most widely read novel, depicts a future society in which books are outlawed and burned by firemen. The novel has remained continuously in print and has been adapted multiple times for film, radio, and stage. His other major works include "Dandelion Wine" (1957), an autobiographical novel rooted in his Illinois boyhood; "Something Wicked This Way Comes" (1962), a dark fantasy about a sinister traveling carnival; and the short story collections "The October Country" (1955), "A Medicine for Melancholy" (1959), and "I Sing the Body Electric!" (1969). Bradbury wrote the screenplay for John Huston's 1956 film adaptation of "Moby Dick" and contributed scripts to "The Twilight Zone" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". His own anthology series, "The Ray Bradbury Theater", ran from 1985 to 1992. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2004, a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2007, and was a recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.