Ray Bradbury

His father strung power and telephone line, his mother had come from Sweden, and the grandparents lived next door in Waukegan, Illinois, which turned up in the fiction as Green Town. The family chased work to Tucson twice and landed in Los Angeles in 1934, when he was 14, with 40 dollars, until his father found a job making wire at 14 dollars a week. He roller-skated around Hollywood hoping to meet somebody and sold a joke to George Burns, his first pay as a writer. He sold newspapers on a corner at South Norton and Olympic. There was no money for college, so he went to the library three days a week for 10 years and said afterward that libraries had raised him.

By his own telling, a carnival performer called Mr. Electrico touched him on the shoulders with an electrified sword over Labor Day weekend in 1932 and told him to live forever, and he started writing within days. He was in Forrest J. Ackerman's fanzine by January 1938, paid 15 dollars for his first professional sale in November 1941, and writing full time at 24. The Martian Chronicles came in 1950 and The Illustrated Man in 1951. That February he published a 25,000-word story called The Fireman, was asked to double it, and rented a typewriter in a study room at UCLA's Powell Library at 10 cents the half hour. Fahrenheit 451 ran to about 50,000 words and cost him 9 dollars and 80 cents. John Huston hired him to write Moby Dick in 1953.

The man who wrote the great American novel about burning books spent his last decades attacking what he called political correctness. In 1994 he said Fahrenheit 451 worked better than ever because political correctness was now the real enemy, that black groups wanted to control what people thought, and that it amounted to thought control. He opposed affirmative action and called for a ban on quotas in higher education. He voted Republican in every presidential election from 1968 except 1976, called Ronald Reagan the greatest president, and said in 2010 that he hoped some of the government could be destroyed that fall. He fought the conversion of his own books into electronic form, and when the Fahrenheit 451 rights came up in December 2011 he allowed it only on condition that any library patron could download the book free.

A stroke in 1999 left him partly dependent on a wheelchair. He kept going to conventions until 2009 and wrote an essay for The New Yorker that ran a week before he died in Los Angeles on June 5, 2012, at 91, after a long illness. He left his personal library to the Waukegan Public Library, where the reading had been done. He chose his own grave at Westwood Village Memorial Park and a stone that reads, Author of Fahrenheit 451. The Apollo 15 astronauts named a crater on the Moon Dandelion in 1971, for the novel. There is an asteroid, 9766 Bradbury. In August 2012 NASA named the place where the Curiosity rover came down on Mars Bradbury Landing.

Ray Bradbury's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Martian Chronicles book
  Short stories fitted together into a settlement of Mars 1950
• The Illustrated Man book
  Eighteen stories hung on a tattooed body 1951
• Fahrenheit 451 book
  Grown from the 1951 story The Fireman, on a coin-operated typewriter 1953
• Moby Dick film
  Screenplay written for John Huston, and the source of a later memoir 1956
• Dandelion Wine book
  Waukegan rewritten as Green Town, Illinois 1957
• Something Wicked This Way Comes book
  The carnival that had followed him since he was 12 1962

• 1932 aged ~12 Meets the carnival performer he called Mr. Electrico, by his own account He said he began writing within days and never stopped.
• 1934 aged ~14 The family reaches Los Angeles with 40 dollars His father found work making wire for 14 dollars a week.
• 1936 aged ~16 Joins the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society at 16 He found the handbill in a secondhand bookstore in Hollywood.
• January 1938 aged 17 Publishes his first story in a fanzine Hollerbochen's Dilemma, in Forrest J. Ackerman's Imagination!
• November 1941 aged 21 Sells his first professional story for 15 dollars Pendulum, written with Henry Hasse, in Super Science Stories.
• 1947 aged ~27 Marries Marguerite McClure and publishes Dark Carnival She died in 2003, after 56 years.
• 1953 aged ~33 Writes Fahrenheit 451 in a rented study room at UCLA Fifty thousand words at 10 cents the half hour.
• 1999 aged ~79 A stroke leaves him partly dependent on a wheelchair He kept appearing at conventions until 2009.
• June 5, 2012 aged 91 Dies in Los Angeles at 91 NASA named the Curiosity landing site on Mars for him that August.

• Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849
  Master of macabre fiction and poetry who invented the detective story and influenced horror worldwide. imitated him until he was 18
• Stephen King b. 1947
  Prolific novelist whose horror and suspense fiction became a major force in American popular culture. later writer of small-town dread
• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. shared a stage on Mars exploration
• Isaac Asimov 1920–1992
  Writer whose science fiction and popular science helped shape public imagination about robots, technology, and the future. contemporary in the genre
• Ursula K. Le Guin 1929–2018
  Writer who used speculative fiction to examine gender, power, culture, and alternative social arrangements. successor in the genre
• Kurt Vonnegut 1922–2007
  Satirical novelist whose Slaughterhouse-Five became an anti-war classic of 20th-century literature. fellow satirist of the American future