I loved his Something Wicked this Way Comes and read it every October.

Thank you Mr. Bradbury!

Judy

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Dennis Fischer <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Updated 6m
> Daughter says author Ray Bradbury has died in California
>
>
> Updated 6m ago
> * Comments
> *
> * Tweet
> *
> *
> *
> *
> LOS ANGELES (AP) – Ray Bradbury, the science fiction-fantasy master who
> transformed his childhood dreams and Cold War fears into telepathic
> Martians,
> lovesick sea monsters, and, in uncanny detail, the high-tech, book-burning
> future of Fahrenheit 451." has died. He was 91.
> * By Steve Castillo, AP
> Ray Bradbury, who wrote everything from science fiction to mystery and
> humor,
> died at 91. He's pictured at a 1997 book signing.
> EnlargeClose
> By Steve Castillo, AP
> Ray Bradbury, who wrote everything from science fiction to mystery and
> humor,
> died at 91. He's pictured at a 1997 book signing.
>
> He died Tuesday night, his daughter said Wednesday. Alexandra Bradbury did
> not
> have additional details.
> Although slowed in recent years by a stroke that meant he had to use a
> wheelchair, Bradbury remained active into his 90s, turning out new novels,
> plays, screenplays and a volume of poetry. He wrote every day in the
> basement
> office of his Cheviot Hills home and appeared from time to time at
> bookstores,
> public library fundraisers and other literary events around Los Angeles.
> His writings ranged from horror and mystery to humor and sympathetic
> stories
> about the Irish, blacks and Mexican-Americans. Bradbury also scripted John
> Huston's 1956 film version of Moby Dick and wrote for The Twilight Zone and
> other television programs, including The Ray Bradbury Theater, for which he
> adapted dozens of his works.
> "What I have always been is a hybrid author," Bradbury said in 2009. "I am
> completely in love with movies, and I am completely in love with theater,
> and I
> am completely in love with libraries."
> Bradbury broke through in 1950 with The Martian Chronicles, a series of
> intertwined stories that satirized capitalism, racism and superpower
> tensions as
> it portrayed Earth colonizers destroying an idyllic Martian civilization.
> Like Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and the Robert Wise film The Day
> the
> Earth Stood Still, Bradbury's book was a Cold War morality tale in which
> imagined lives on other planets serve as commentary on human behavior on
> Earth.
> The Martian Chronicles has been published in more than 30 languages, was
> made
> into a TV miniseries and inspired a computer game.
> The Martian Chronicles prophesized the banning of books, especially works
> of
> fantasy, a theme Bradbury would take on fully in the 1953 release,
> Fahrenheit
> 451. Inspired by the Cold War, the rise of television and the author's
> passion
> for libraries, it was an apocalyptic narrative of nuclear war abroad and
> empty
> pleasure at home, with firefighters assigned to burn books instead of
> putting
> blazes out (451 degrees Fahrenheit, Bradbury had been told, was the
> temperature
> at which texts went up in flames).
> It was Bradbury's only true science-fiction work, according to the author,
> who
> said all his other works should have been classified as fantasy. "It was a
> book
> based on real facts and also on my hatred for people who burn books," he
> told
> The Associated Press in 2002.
> A futuristic classic often taught alongside George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous
> Huxley's Brave New World, Bradbury's novel anticipated iPods, interactive
> television, electronic surveillance and live, sensational media events,
> including televised police pursuits. Francois Truffaut directed a 1966
> movie
> version and the book's title was referenced — without Bradbury's
> permission, the
> author complained — for Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9-11.
> Although involved in many futuristic projects, including the New York
> World's
> Fair of 1964 and the Spaceship Earth display at Walt Disney World in
> Florida,
> Bradbury was deeply attached to the past. He refused to drive a car or fly,
> telling the AP that witnessing a fatal traffic accident as a child left
> behind a
> permanent fear of automobiles. In his younger years, he got around by
> bicycle or
> roller-skates.
> "I'm not afraid of machines," he told Writer's Digest in 1976. "I don't
> think
> the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken
> over.
> And if we don't take the toys out of their hands, we're fools."
> Bradbury's literary style was honed in pulp magazines and influenced by
> Ernest
> Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, and he became the rare science fiction writer
> treated seriously by the literary world. In 2007, he received a special
> Pulitzer
> Prize citation "for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential
> career as
> an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy." Seven years earlier,
> he
> received an honorary National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an
> honor given to Philip Roth and Arthur Miller among others.
> "Everything I've done is a surprise, a wonderful surprise," Bradbury said
> during
> his acceptance speech in 2000. "I sometimes get up at night when I can't
> sleep
> and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a
> paragraph and
> say, 'My God, did I write that? Did I write that?', because it's still a
> surprise."
> Other honors included an Academy Award nomination for an animated film,
> Icarus
> Montgolfier Wright, and an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree.
> His fame
> even extended to the moon, where Apollo astronauts named a crater
> "Dandelion
> Crater," in honor of Dandelion Wine, his beloved coming-of-age novel, and
> an
> asteroid was named 9766 Bradbury.
> Born Ray Douglas Bradbury on Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Ill., the author
> once
> described himself as "that special freak, the man with the child inside who
> remembers all." He claimed to have total recall of his life, dating even
> to his
> final weeks in his mother's womb.
> His father, Leonard, a power company lineman, was a descendant of Mary
> Bradbury,
> who was tried for witchcraft at Salem, Mass. The author's mother, Esther,
> read
> him the Wizard of Oz. His Aunt Neva introduced him to Edgar Allan Poe and
> gave
> him a love of autumn, with its pumpkin picking and Halloween costumes.
> "If I could have chosen my birthday, Halloween would be it," he said over
> the
> years.
> Nightmares that plagued him as a boy also stocked his imagination, as did
> his
> youthful delight with the Buck Rogers and Tarzan comic strips, early horror
> films, Tom Swift adventure books and the works of Jules Verne and H.G.
> Wells.
> "The great thing about my life is that everything I've done is a result of
> what
> I was when I was 12 or 13," he said in 1982.
> Bradbury's family moved to Los Angeles in 1934. He became a movie buff and
> a
> voracious reader. "I never went to college, so I went to the library," he
> explained.
> He tried to write at least 1,000 words a day, and sold his first story in
> 1941.
> He submitted work to pulp magazines until he was finally accepted by such
> upscale publications as The New Yorker. Bradbury's first book, a short
> story
> collection called Dark Carnival, was published in 1947.
> He was so poor during those years that he didn't have an office or even a
> telephone. "When the phone rang in the gas station right across the alley
> from
> our house, I'd run to answer it," he said.
> He wrote Fahrenheit 451 at the UCLA library, on typewriters that rented
> for 10
> cents a half hour. He said he carried a sack full of dimes to the library
> and
> completed the book in nine days, at a cost of $9.80.
> Few writers could match the inventiveness of his plots: A boy outwits a
> vampire
> by stuffing him with silver coins; a dinosaur mistakes a fog horn for a
> mating
> call (filmed as The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms); Ernest Hemingway is flown
> back
> to life on a time machine. In The Illustrated Man, one of his most famous
> stories, a man's tattoo foretells a horrifying deed — he will murder his
> wife.
> A dynamic speaker with a booming, distinctive voice, he could be blunt and
> gruff. But Bradbury was also a gregarious and friendly man, approachable in
> public and often generous with his time to readers as well as fellow
> writers.
> In 2009, at a lecture celebrating the first anniversary of a small library
> in
> Southern California's San Gabriel Valley, Bradbury exhorted his listeners
> to
> live their lives as he said he had lived his: "Do what you love and love
> what
> you do."
> "If someone tells you to do something for money, tell them to go to hell,"
> he
> shouted to raucous applause.
> Until near the end of his life, Bradbury resisted one of the innovations he
> helped anticipate: electronic books, likening them to burnt metal and
> urging
> readers to stick to the old-fashioned pleasures of ink and paper. But in
> late
> 2011, as the rights to Fahrenheit 451 were up for renewal, he gave in and
> allowed his most famous novel to come out in digital form. In return, he
> received a great deal of money and a special promise from Simon &
> Schuster: The
> publisher agreed to make the e-book available to libraries, the only Simon
> &
> Schuster e-book at the time that library patrons were allowed to download.
> Bradbury is survived by his four daughters. Marguerite Bradbury, his wife
> of 56
> years, died in 2003.
>