Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury was born the third of four children to Esther Moberg and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury in Waukegan, a large city near Chicago, Illinois. Bradbury’s family struggled financially during the Great Depression, and they moved back and forth between Waukegan and Tucson, Arizona, before finally settling in Los Angeles, California, when Bradbury was fourteen years old. Bradbury immediately fell in love with Hollywood and frequently snuck into movie theaters and roller-skated throughout the city hoping to catch a glimpse of movie stars. Despite his love for Los Angeles, however, Waukegan remained an important part of his life. For Bradbury, Waukegan symbolized safety and comfort, and it serves as the inspiration for Green Town, the fictional city in Something Wicked This Way Comes. As a child, Bradbury was an avid reader, and while he initially wanted to be a magician, he began writing at the young age of eleven. He graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1938, the same year he published his first story, “Hollerbochen’s Dilemma,” in the magazine Imagination! Bradbury did not attend college and openly rejected higher education. He was quoted as saying, “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.” Bradbury sold his first story, “The Lake,” in 1942 for less than fourteen dollars, and he began writing full-time two years later after he was denied entrance into the United States military due to bad eyesight. In 1947, he married his long-time girlfriend, Marguerite, the only woman he had ever dated, and published Dark Carnival, a collection of short stories, that same year. Bradbury went on to pen over thirty novels, including Something Wicked This Way Comes and Fahrenheit 451, and hundreds of short stories, poems, and plays. He is the winner of numerous awards and accolades, including the Prometheus Award in 1984 and a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. In 2000, he was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation and was later made Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. Bradbury was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2002, and in 2003 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Woodbury University. In 1999, Bradbury suffered a stroke, which severely impaired his mobility, but he continued to write until his death in 2012 at the age of 91. Upon his death, Bradbury willed his personal library to the public library in his hometown Waukegan.