Ray Bradbury

Overview

Ray Bradbury was an American writer whose hundreds of short stories and 11 novels helped define 20th-century science fiction and legitimize the genre as a significant literary form.

Bradbury was born in Illinois, but his family moved to Los Angeles after his father lost his job during the Great Depression. It was there that he began taking writing seriously by spending days in the public library and joining a club of science fiction writers and enthusiasts. By the mid 1940s, he was placing stories in magazines and published his first book, "Dark Carnival," in 1947.

1950's "The Martian Chronicles," a collection of interlinked stories about the colonization of Mars, and 1953's "Fahrenheit 451," a dystopian satire about censorship, propelled him into the mainstream of literature and popular culture. Today, he's widely regarded as one of the most important figures in science fiction.

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