Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man are three of Ray Bradbury's most famous books. Ray Bradbury has written thousands of published items from poetry to short stories to three hundred page books; he has done it all. Bradbury's best writing combines a great imagination with a poetic style of its own.

Ray Bradbury, an American author was born on August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. Ray is the third son of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury. In the fall of 1926 his family moved to Tucson, Arizona, only to return to Waukegan again in May of 1927. By 1931 he began writing his own stories on butcher paper. His childhood was very important to him because it was a constant source of intense situations, emotions, and feelings that generate great stories. As a teen he was most inspired by seeing "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." In 1932 his father was laid off at his job as an electrical lineman, the family moved to Tucson and again returned to Waukegan the following year. In 1934 the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California. Bradbury graduated from Los Angeles high school in 1938. From 1938 to 1942 he sold newspapers on the street corners of Los Angeles. All of his spare time was spent on a typewriter.

Ray decided to become a full time writer just one year after graduating from high school. Bradbury's first published collection of short stories was Dark Carnival. His short stories have appeared in more than 1,000 school curriculum "recommended reading" anthologies, but Bradbury's major breakthrough came in 1950 when The Martian Chronicles was published.

The Martian Chronicles is a scien...

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...and. Certainly he has pictured a place so awful, so replete with destruction, that as readers, we want no part of it. We can imagine easily that Bradbury is responding not only to his authorial need to show us how similar our decline can be to the decline of Mars in the book. (Robert Peltier)

When asked in an interview what he thought about censorship he said, "You have to have taste." His opinion on screenwriters these days, "they are just too lazy to write without profanity." Ray Bradbury has been giving us things to read for over sixty years. Bradbury's writing style has that something that makes everyone interested. When asked if he considers himself a teacher he said, "As a writer you must be. You can't be self-conscious about it, but if you do something good someone might imitate it. So if you like my writing, you may very well imitate my passion." (Bradbury)