NYT AUTHOR Ray Bradbury
Ray
Bradbury was a master of science fiction whose lyrical evocations of the future
reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America.
Mr.
Bradbury died on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91.
His
most famous novel is “Fahrenheit 451,” published in 1953. Named for the
temperature at which paper ignites, the novel depicts a near-future society in
which firemen don’t extinguish fires but instead burn books, and where the
complacent populace, numbed by nonstop television and advertising, seems all
too eager to embrace enforced ignorance.
By
many estimations Mr. Bradbury was the writer most responsible for bringing
modern science fiction into the literary mainstream. His name would appear near
the top of any list of major science-fiction writers of the 20th century,
beside those of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and the
Polish author Stanislaw Lem.
In
Mr. Bradbury’s lifetime more than eight million copies of his books were sold
in 36 languages. They included the short-story collections “The Martian
Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man” and “The Golden Apples of the Sun,” and the
novels “Fahrenheit 451” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”
Though
his work never won a Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Bradbury received a special Pulitzer
citation in 2007 “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career
as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.”
The
citation described him as “one of those rare individuals whose writing has
changed the way people think.’'
“The
Martian Chronicles” became a staple of high school and college English courses,
an achievement not without irony; Mr. Bradbury disdained formal education. He
went so far as to attribute his success as a writer to his never having gone to
college.
Instead
he read everything he could get his hands on, by authors including Edgar Allan
Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Thomas Wolfe and Ernest
Hemingway. He paid homage to them in 1971 in the autobiographical essay “How
Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries.” (Late in
life he took an active role in fund-raising efforts for public libraries in
Southern California.)
Mr.
Bradbury started his literary career as the self-publisher of the fanzine
Futuria Fantasia when he was 18. The fanzine’s four issues were anthologized
and reissued in 2007 by Graham Press. The fanzine was bankrolled by Forrest J.
Ackerman, one of science fiction’s greatest fans and the man said to have
coined the term sci-fi; only 100 original copies were printed. They contain
early work by such future science fiction luminaries as Hannes Bok and Robert
Heinlein.
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