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Author Ray Bradbury Dead at 91
Celebrated author Ray Bradbury has died. He was 91. The beloved sci-fi scribe's death was confirmed with the media Wednesday morning, reports the L.A. Times; Bradbury died in Southern California Tuesday night. Bradbury died "peacefully," a spokesman his publisher, Harper Collins, told NPR.Considered a trailblazer in the genre of science fiction, and credited for bridging the worlds of fantasy fiction and literature, Bradbury's lifetime of novels and short stories include many that are beloved as classics, including "Fahrenheit 451," "The Martian Chronicles," and "Something Wicked This Way Comes."
Born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury came of age in Los Angeles, where he attended high school and graduated in 1938. "Although his formal education ended there, he became a 'student of life,' selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter," according to Bradbury's bio on his site.
Bradbury has been writing steadily and professionally since 1943. However, he's not been limited to just books and stories:
He has been nominated for an Academy Award (for his animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright), and has won an Emmy Award (for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree). He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the creative consultant on the United States Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. In 1982 he created the interior metaphors for the Spaceship Earth display at Epcot Center, Disney World, and later contributed to the conception of the Orbitron space ride at Euro-Disney, France.
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In fact, Bradbury was never comfortable pigeon-holing himself as a sci-fi writer:
“I'm not a science fiction writer,” he was frequently quoted as saying. “I've written only one book of science fiction [“Fahrenheit 451”]. All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.”
Bradbury talks about the "theatre inside [his] head" in this clip about his creative process:
Bradbury married his wife, Maggie, in 1947, and they remained together in Los Angeles until she died in 2003. They had four children and eight grandchildren, and several cats.
A 1963 TV documentary about the author:
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The 1966 trailer for the film adaptation of "Fahrenheit 451"
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