Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was an American author whose work helped bring science fiction and fantasy into the literary mainstream. Born in Waukegan, Illinois, he moved with his family to Los Angeles as a boy and, unable to afford college, educated himself in public libraries, which he credited as the true source of his learning.

He began publishing in pulp magazines in the 1940s and made his name with The Martian Chronicles, a linked collection of stories about the human settlement of Mars that used the trappings of science fiction to examine very human hopes and failings.

His most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, imagined a future in which books are outlawed and burned, a vision of censorship and conformity that has become one of the defining cautionary tales of modern literature. Other beloved works include The Illustrated Man and the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Across more than five hundred published works of short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, and poetry, Bradbury wrote with a lyrical, nostalgic style rooted in childhood, small-town America, and a deep love of the imagination. His stories are carried by readers across a lifetime once encountered.

In recognition of his enormous influence he received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000 and the National Medal of Arts in 2004, cementing his place as one of the truly classic American authors of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.