Bradbury mss., 1959

Biographical Note

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, IL, to Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Marie Moberg; in the mid-1930s, he moved with his family to Los Angeles, CA. At the age of sixteen, Bradbury began his literary career by publishing the poem "In Memory of Will Rogers" in the Waukegan News-Sun . After saving up lunch money for a typewriter and graduating high school in 1938, Bradbury sold newspapers to support his burgeoning career as a professional writer. He published numerous short stories in fan magazines and made a big break in 1941 with the selling of "Pendulum," a story he co-authored with Henry Hasse, to Super Science Stories. By 1942, he made enough sales to support himself as a writer. On September 27, 1947, Bradbury married Marguerite Susan McClure, and they raised four daughters together. Bradbury's distinguished and prolific eight-decade literary career, which was most notable for its contribution to science fiction but also ventured into fantasy, horror, and mystery, included such seminal works as Dark Carnival (1947), The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). In the early 1950s, he did some work with director John Huston, who had an interest in making a film adaptation of The Martian Chronicles , but the project was never realized; Bradbury wrote the screenplay for Huston's Moby Dick (1956) instead during a six-month stay in Ireland. Bradbury had a television series, The Ray Bradbury Theatre (1985-1992), for which he wrote many of the episodes. His achievements were recognized with awards from the National Book Foundation, the Pulitzer Prize Board, the PEN Center USA, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In his obituary, The New York Times wrote of Bradbury: "By many estimations, Mr. Bradbury was the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream." He passed away on June 5, 2012, in Los Angeles, at the age of 91.