Personal Background
American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and poet—Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22, 1920, the third son of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury. Often said to be America’s best science fiction writer, Bradbury has also earned acclaim in the fields of poetry, drama, and screenwriting. As a young boy, Bradbury’s life revolved around magic, magicians, circuses, and other such fantasies. Whenever traveling circuses pitched their tents in Waukegan, Bradbury and his brother were always on hand. Blackstone the Magician came to town when Bradbury was eleven, and he attended every performance. Mr. Electrico, another magician of sorts, particularly impressed Bradbury with his death-defying electric chair act. In fact, this magician once gave young Bradbury such a convincing talk that Bradbury decided to become a magician—the best in the world!
Bradbury’s love of fantasy was encouraged by his family. Their favorite time of the year was Halloween, which they celebrated with even more enthusiasm than they celebrated Christmas. When Bradbury was eight, his Aunt Neva helped him devise the grandest Halloween party imaginable. The Bradbury home was transformed into a haunted house with grinning pumpkins, ghost-like sheets hanging in the cellar, and raw chicken meat representing parts of a dead witch. In years to come, these details furnished material for Bradbury’s stories.
In addition to Bradbury’s magician heroes, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Tarzan ranked high on his list of favorites. Bradbury read the series of books about the Emerald City of Oz, and his Aunt Neva read him the terror-filled tales of Poe. All these stories with their fantastic characters and settings were dramatic influences on Bradbury’s later life.
Literary Career
Bradbury began his writing career in 1931 at age eleven, using butcher paper that he had to unroll as his story progressed. The following year, he and his family moved from Illinois to Arizona, and that same year, Bradbury received a toy typewriter on which he wrote his first stories.
In 1934, when he was fourteen, his family moved from Arizona to Los Angeles, where his writing career began to solidify. In 1937, he became a member of the Los Angeles Science Fiction League, whose help enabled him to publish four issues of his own science-fiction fan magazine, or “fanzine,” Futuria Fantasia. Bradbury’s graduation from a Los Angeles high school in 1938 ended his formal education, but he furthered it himself—at night in the library and by day at his typewriter. His first professional sale was for a short story entitled “Pendulum,” co-authored with Henry Hasse; it appeared in Super Science Stories, August 1941, on Bradbury’s twenty-first birthday. In 1942, Bradbury wrote “The Lake,” the story in which he discovered his distinctive writing style. By 1943, he had given up his job selling newspapers and began writing full time, contributing numerous short stories to periodicals. His short story “The Big Black and White Game” was selected for Best American Short Stories in 1945.
Bradbury married Marguerite McClure in 1947, and the same year, he gathered much of his best materials and published them as Dark Carnival, his first short story collection. From then on, Bradbury’s fantasy works were published in numerous magazines throughout the country.
Bradbury says that he learned to write by recalling his own experiences. Many of his early stories are based, unsurprisingly, on his childhood experiences in Illinois. For example, “The Jar” (Weird Tales, 1944) is based on the first time that Bradbury saw a pickled embryo, which was displayed in a sideshow at one of the carnivals visiting his hometown. “Homecoming” (Mademoiselle, 1946) was inspired by his relatives’ marvelous Halloween parties, and “Uncle Einar” (Dark Carnival, 1947), a story about a man with green wings, is based loosely on one of Bradbury’s uncles.
In 1947, after Dark Carnival (a collection of weird and macabre stories) was published, Bradbury turned to another kind of writing—philosophical science fiction. One work in particular, The Martian Chronicles (1950), grew out of Bradbury’s own personal philosophy and his concern for the future of humankind. The Martian Chronicles reflects some of the prevailing anxieties of America in the early atomic age of the 1950's: the fear of nuclear war, the longing for a simpler life, reactions against racism and censorship, and the fear of foreign political powers.
