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Daughter says author Ray Bradbury has died in California


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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.
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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.