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Written in September of 2000 by David Bock, university of colorado student.
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Ray Bradbury
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Today, science fiction has grown respectable enough that one is tempted to have the label stamped on one's books. Yet, I am not that brave. Snobs still live in the thickets, just beyond the orchard.
Raymond Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, which he would later use as a model for the towns envisioned in his novel The Martian Chronicles. He said, "Mars is a mirror, not a crystal. Taking the people from my home town who had been raised in a green land, I parceled them into rockets and sent them off to Mars."
During the ages of three and six years old, he developed an interest in the horror genre after seeing plays of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. His fear as an eight-year-old of a ravine near his house was incorporated in his later story "Dandelion Wine." When he received a toy typewriter for Christmas in 1932, he wrote his own stories about Buck Rogers.
As Bradbury finished high school, he was still unsure about his future: Should he become a writer or an actor? He was in the drama club at Los Angeles High School and performed in various shows, but he also wrote scripts for the shows while continuing his short story writing. "So, from the beginning, I was headed wrong in two fields that would never prove out. Yet, I plunged ahead, feeling that if I were wrong I would be the best creative that ever was."
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.
In 1941, Bradbury got his start as a professional science fiction writer with his first short story "Pendulum," which was featured in Super Science Stories. For the next ten years, he continued to write short stories that appeared in numerous science fiction magazines such as Weird Tales and Best American Short Stories. Because of trouble with his eyes, he was exempt from service during World War II, but he did write for organizations like the Red Cross and the Los Angeles Department of Civil Defense. The sudden and immediate reality of atomic war, fascism, and global warfare during these years affected Bradbury--these objects of horror are included and explored in his novels, including The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451.
In 1949, Bradbury met with the Doubleday books editor, also named Bradbury, who wanted Ray to write a book with a "unified theme." Ray came back a day later with an outline for a book, which he'd named The Martian Chronicles. Even today, Bradbury considers himself to be a short story writer and not a person who writes novels. For example, The Martian Chronicles is considered to be a novel, but is really a collection of short stories connected together with interwoven themes.
My first book for Doubleday, The Martian Chronicles, was published with "Doubleday Science Fiction" stamped on it, front and back. All of which meant instant neglect for any book so published, so weighted down and intellectually wounded.
When The Martian Chronicles was released, it was greeted with little notice from critics: They didn't care for the way Bradbury made the colonies on Mars analogues of Earth's midwestern towns and didn't like the way Bradbury had populated these towns with characters based on real midwestern people. About this time, Bradbury was in a bookstore and met Chris Isherwood, a critic writing for Tomorrow magazine. "On impulse, I bought a copy of my own book and shoved it at him." A few days later, Isherwood called Bradbury told him he thought The Martian Chronicles was "incredible." Immediately after Isherwood's notice of the novel, Bradbury said that other critics came "to feed among the robot sheep because Isherwood said it was permitted." After The Martian Chronicles later received good publicity in The New York Times Book Review, Bradbury garnered so much fame that in June of 1952 he was invited to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America convention where he was elected president pro-temp.
In 1951, Bradbury wrote a short story called "The Fireman," which was published in Galaxy magazine. Seeing its possibilities, he lengthened "The Fireman" into what is considered by many to be one of his masterpieces, Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury continued to write short stories for science fiction magazines while also contributing a script to Universal Studios that later became It Came From Outer Space. In 1953, Fahrenheit 451 was published and then serialized in three issues of Playboy magazine--a major accomplishment that helped the public accept Bradbury's work.
And then, of course, there is the problem of reverse snobbism, encountered among science fiction writers and fans who, over the years, complained that when I wasn't being unscientific, I wasn't writing science fiction at all.
After winning awards for Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury continued to write, publishing works such as R is for Rocket in 1962, S is for Space in 1966, and I Sing The Body Electric in 1969, portions of which Bradbury permitted to be made into a teleplay and then featured on Rod Serling's popular televesion program, The Twilight Zone. Bradbury was also hired as a consultant at the 1963/1964 New York World's Fair and was also hired as a consultant by Disney to help design exhibits for their upcoming projects. Fahrenheit 451 was released as a major motion picture in 1966, and The Illustrated Man was released as a film, too, in 1969. In 1979, NBC aired a three-part mini-series of The Martian Chronicles, starring Rock Hudson, among others. In May of 1997, Bradbury mentioned during an Internet conference that he had given a script to Steven Spielberg to possibly produce a movie. Since the late 1980s, The Ray Bradbury Theater, reminiscent of The Twilight Zone but darker, has been featured on HBO and The USA Network.
Over the years, Bradbury has received several prestigious awards for his work including the Annual Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, The National Institute Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Valentine Davies Award from the Writers Guild of America. During the creation of this biography (September 2000) Bradbury was living in California and still writing.
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