He went so far as to attribute his success as a writer to his never having gone to college. Bradbury himself disdained formal education.
Though his books became a staple of high school and college English courses, Mr. So he eliminated the jargon he packaged his troubling speculations about the future in an appealing blend of cozy colloquialisms and poetic metaphors. These readers had no patience for the technical jargon of the science fiction pulps. Bradbury looked to a larger audience: the readers of mass-circulation magazines like Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post. Science fiction writers, who were accustomed to thinking about the role of science in society, had trenchant things to say about the nuclear threat.īut the audience for science fiction, published mostly in pulp magazines, was small and insignificant. The same “super science” that had ended World War II now appeared to threaten the very existence of civilization. The advent of the atomic bomb in 1945 left many Americans deeply ambivalent toward science. Bradbury was hardly the first writer to represent science and technology as a mixed bag of blessings and abominations. Critics who had dismissed science fiction as adolescent prattle praised “Chronicles” as stylishly written morality tales set in a future that seemed just around the corner. The book celebrated the romance of space travel while condemning the social abuses that modern technology had made possible, and its impact was immediate and lasting. By 30 he had made his reputation with “The Martian Chronicles,” a collection of thematically linked stories published in 1950. Bradbury sold his first story to a magazine called Super Science Stories in his early 20s. “It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another,” he wrote, noting, “You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion.” There he recalled his “hungry imagination” as a boy in Illinois. Bradbury in its June 4 double issue devoted to science fiction. The New Yorker published an autobiographical essay by Mr. His writing career stretched across 70 years, to the last weeks of his life. Bradbury received a Pulitzer citation in 2007 “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.” Though none of his works won a Pulitzer Prize, Mr. They include 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.” More than eight million copies of his books have been sold in 36 languages. Bradbury’s stories fired their own imaginations. His books are still being taught in schools, where many a reader has been introduced to them half a century after they first appeared. Heinlein and the Polish author Stanislaw Lem. 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.
Bradbury was the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream. His death was confirmed by his agent, Michael Congdon.īy many estimations Mr. Ray Bradbury, a master of science fiction whose imaginative and lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles.
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