Ray Bradbury Biography

Poet, Author (1920–2012)

Ray Bradbury was an American fantasy and horror author who rejected being categorized as a science fiction author, claiming that his work was based on the fantastical and unreal. His best known novel is Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian study of future American society in which critical thought is outlawed. He is also remembered for several other popular works, including The Martian Chronicles andSomething Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury won the Pulitzer in 2004, and is one of the most celebrated authors of the 21st century. He died in Los Angeles on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91.

Early Life

Author Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a lineman for power and telephone utilities, and Ester Moberg Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant. Bradbury enjoyed a relatively idyllic childhood in Waukegan, which he later incorporated into several semi-autobiographical novels and short stories. As a child, he was a huge fan of magicians, and a voracious reader of adventure and fantasy fiction — especially L. Frank Baum, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Bradbury decided to become a writer at about age 12 or 13. He later said that he made the decision in hopes of emulating his heroes, and to "live forever" through his fiction.

Bradbury's family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1934. As a teenager, he participated in his school's drama club and occasionally befriended Hollywood celebrities. His first official pay as a writer came for contributing a joke to George Burns' Burns & Allen Show. After graduation from high school in 1938, Bradbury couldn't afford to go to college, so he went to the local library instead. "Libraries raised me," he later said. "I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression, and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."

Literary Works and Honors

To support himself while he wrote, Bradbury sold newspapers. He published his first short story in a fan magazine in 1938, the same year he graduated from high school. The next year, he published four issues of his own fan magazine, Futuria Fantasia. Nearly every piece in the magazine was written by Bradbury himself; he used a variety of pseudonyms to try to hide the fact that the magazine was a virtual one-man show. "I was still years away from writing my first good short story," he later said, "but I could see my future. I knew where I wanted to go."

Bradbury sold his first professional piece, the story "Pendulum," in November 1941, just a month before the United States entered World War II, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Ruled ineligible for military service by his local draft board because of his vision problems, Bradbury became a full-time writer by early 1943. His first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947.

That same year, he married Marguerite "Maggie" McClure, whom he met while she was working as a clerk at a bookstore. McClure was the breadwinner in the early days of their marriage, supporting Bradbury as he worked on his writing for little to no pay. The couple had four daughters, Susan (1949), Ramona (1951), Bettina (1955) and Alexandra (1958).

In 1950, Bradbury published his first major work, The Martian Chronicles, which detailed the conflict between humans colonizing the red planet and the native Martians they encountered there. While taken by many to be a work of science fiction, Bradbury himself considered it to be fantasy. "I don't write science fiction," he said. "Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see?" Television and comic book adaptations of Bradbury's short stories began to appear in 1951, introducing him to a wider audience.

Bradbury's best-known work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, became an instant classic in the era of McCarthyism for its exploration of themes of censorship and conformity. In 2007 Bradbury himself disputed that censorship was the main theme of Fahrenheit 451, instead explaining the book as a story about how television drives away interest in reading: "Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was."

Despite his apparent distaste for television, Bradbury advocated for film adaptations of his work. He wrote numerous screenplays and treatments, including a 1956 take on Moby Dick. In 1986, Bradbury developed his own HBO television series, allowing him to produce adaptations of his short stories. The series ran until 1992.

Famously prolific, Bradbury wrote for several hours every day throughout his entire life, allowing him to publish more than 30 books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, screenplays and plays.

Though Bradbury won many honors and awards throughout his life, his favorite was perhaps being named "ideas consultant" for the United States Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. "Can you imagine how excited I was?" he later said about the honor. "'Cause I'm changing lives, and that's the thing. If you can build a good museum, if you can make a good film, if you can build a good world's fair, if you can build a good mall, you're changing the future. You're influencing people, so that they'll get up in the morning and say, 'Hey, it's worthwhile going to work.' That's my function, and it should be the function of every science fiction writer around. To offer hope. To name the problem and then offer the solution. And I do, all the time."

Christmas Story. From The Martian Chronicles 

Tomorrow would be Christmas, and even while the three of them rode to the rocket port the mother and father were worried. It was the boy’s first flight into space, his very first time in a rocket, and they wanted everything to be perfect. So when, at the customs table, they were forced to leave behind his gift, which exceeded the weight limit by no more than a few ounces, and the little tree with the lovely white candles, they felt themselves deprived of the season and their love.

The boy was waiting for them in the terminal room. Walking toward him, after their unsuccessful clash with the Inter-planetary officials, the mother and father whispered to each other.

“What shall we do?”

“Nothing, nothing. What can we do?”

“Silly rules!”

“And he so wanted the tree!”

The siren gave a great howl and people pressed forward into the Mars Rocket. The mother and father walked at the very last, their small pale son between them, silent.

“I’ll think of something,” said the father.

“What…?” asked the boy.

And the rocket took off and they were flung headlong into dark space.

The rocket moved and left fire behind and left Earth behind on which the date was December 24, 2052, heading out into a place where there was no time at all, no month, no year, no hour. They slept away the rest of the first “day.” Near midnight, by their Earth-time New York watches, the boy awoke and said, “I want to go look out the porthole.”

There was only one port, a “window” of immensely thick glass of some size, up on the next deck.

“Not quite yet,” said the father. “I’ll take you up later.”

“I want to see where we are and where we’re going.”

“I want you to wait for a reason,” said the father.

He had been lying awake, turning this way and that, thinking of the abandoned gift, the problem of the season, the lost tree and the white candles. And at last, sitting up, no more than five minutes ago, he believed he had found a plan. He need only carry it out and the journey would be fine and joyous indeed.

“Son,” he said, “in exactly one half-hour it will be Christmas.”

“Oh,” said the mother, dismayed that he had mentioned it. Somehow she had rather hoped that the boy would forget.

The boy’s face grew feverish and his lips trembled. “I know, I know. Will I get a present, will I? Will I have a tree? Will I have a tree? You promised —“

“Yes, yes, all that, and more.” said the father.

The mother started. “But —“

“I mean it,” said the father. “I really mean it. All and more, much more. Excuse me, now. I’ll be back.”

He left them for about twenty minutes. When he came back, he was smiling. “Almost time.”

“Can I hold your watch?” asked the boy, and the watch was handed over and he held it ticking in his fingers as the rest of the hour drifted by in fire and silence and unfelt motion.

“It’s Christmas now! Christmas! Where’s my present?”

“Here we go,” said the father and took his boy by the shoulder and led him from the room, down the hall, up a rampway, his wife following.

“I don’t understand,” she kept saying.

“You will. Here we are,” said the father.

They had stopped at the closed door of a large cabin. The father tapped three times and then twice in a code. The door opened and the light in the cabin went out and there was a whisper of voices.

“Go on in, son,” said the father.

“It’s dark.”

“I’ll hold your hand. Come on, Mama.”

They stepped into the room and the door shut, and the room was very dark indeed. And before them loomed a great glass eye, the porthole, a window four feet high and six feet wide, from which they could look out into space.

The boy gasped.

Behind him, the father and the mother gasped with him, and then in the dark room some people began to sing.

“Merry Christmas, son,” said the father.

And the voices in the room sang the old, the familiar carols, and the boy moved slowly until his face was pressed against the cool glass of the port. And he stood there for a long, long time, just looking and looking out into space and the deep night at the burning and the burning of ten billion, billion white and lovely candles…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn05bnrMDbo

Estudiante. Pablo Miranda.

Source.http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2011/12/gift-by-ray-bradbury.html
https://www.biography.com/people/ray-bradbury-9223240