All Summer in a Day: About Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, where he spent most of his youth. Waukegan always held sway in Bradbury’s imagination, becoming “Green Town” in several of his works which center around small-town America, including his classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury always knew he wanted to be an artist of some kind. He began writing at age 12, after which he claims to have written every day for the rest of his life. At age 14, Bradbury moved with his family to Los Angeles. Bradbury did not attend college, instead relying on local libraries for his education, saying, “When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Bradbury wrote in a wide variety of genres, including autobiography, noir, and poetry, but he is perhaps best known as a writer of science fiction. With the publication of his science fiction opus The Martian Chronicles in 1950, Bradbury established himself as a futurist and important voice during the so-called “Space Age” of the 1950s and ‘60s in America. His science fiction works of this time often paint a dystopian vision of the future, as in Fahrenheit 451, one of Bradbury’s darkest and most famous works. His pieces frequently examine the negative effects of a human society whose technological advances put greater and greater distance between humans and the natural world. However, Bradbury’s science fiction work is also notable for its sense of wonder and possibility, which has inspired both children and NASA scientists alike. Due to his enduring popularity and influence, several features of the Martian landscape have been named after Bradbury and his stories.

Over the course of his career, Bradbury penned over 400 short stories and over fifty books, in addition to essays, plays, screenplays, and even an opera. He received numerous awards and accolades during his lifetime, including the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2007, Bradbury received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, which reads, in part: “Ray Bradbury is one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think…His timeless, constant appeal to audiences young and old has proven him to be one of the truly classic authors of the 20th century—and the 21st.” Ray Bradbury died on June 5, 2012, in Los Angeles at the age of 91.

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