Ray Bradbury

American · 1920 to 2012

Born Ray Douglas Bradbury on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to a Swedish mother and a power-line worker of English stock, he was named for the silent-film star Douglas Fairbanks and raised in a household crowded with aunts, cousins, and library books. He dated his vocation to a Labor Day weekend in 1932 when a carnival magician named Mr. Electrico tapped him with an electrified sword and told him to live forever. He began writing the next morning and never stopped. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1934 with forty dollars between them. Too poor for college, he educated himself in the public libraries, sold newspapers on a corner, and at twenty-seven married Marguerite McClure, the only woman he ever dated. He never learned to drive. The Martian Chronicles (1950) reframed pulp space-adventure as lyric meditation on conquest and homesickness. Fahrenheit 451 (1953), about a fireman in a society that burns books, was hammered out in nine days on a rented dime-fed typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library. Dandelion Wine (1957) returned to a remembered Waukegan summer he renamed Green Town. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) gave the carnival back to the children. He wrote a screenplay for John Huston's Moby Dick during a difficult winter in Dublin in 1953, scripts for Alfred Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone, and a poem nearly every Sunday for fifty years. He refused to fly and never learned to drive; he believed Mr. Electrico's blessing literally. He died in Los Angeles on June 5, 2012, at ninety-one, after a long illness, having willed his personal library to the Carnegie branch in Waukegan where he had first read H. G. Wells as a boy.