Ray Bradbury Dies

AP reported that Ray Bardbury died in Los Angeles Tuesday night at the age of 91.

Bradbury is best known for his novel “Fahrenheit 451", which a lot of us had to read in school.  He also wrote short stories and poetry.  His show, The Ray Bradbury Theater, was a blast!  I loved it.

According to the AP article, he was active into his 90s, writing everyday in the basement office of his home.  His wife Maggie died in 2003; they were married in 1947.  Together they had four daughters and eight grandchildren.  It takes a real man to raise girls!

His website described his office:

Ray's office is in his basement, a fascinating warren of rooms beneath his Los Angeles home. In the main room, you can see Ray's desk and typewriter where he works every day. The room is lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, but as you can see, the shelves hold much more than books. There are toys, stuffed animals, masks from around the world, gifts from fans, and souvenirs picked up over the years having to do with books, theater, television, and film. 

He scripted the 1956 film version of Moby Dick and wrote “I sing the body electric” for the Twilight Zone.  Plans were in hand to use Bradbury more for Twilight zone, but never materialized.  He also wrote for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

HERE is a listing of all his work in chronological order.

Bradbury designed Spaceship Earth for  Disney's Epcot.  A crater on the moon was named after one of his stories "Dandelion Crater" as part of the 1971 Apollo 15 moon landing.  (HERE)

According to Raybradbury.com, Bradbury was awarded the National Book Foundation's 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, an the National Medal of Arts in 2004.

Yahoo News cites  Texas A&M Commerce English Professor Robin Ann Reid, "The universe is a little emptier right now . . . There's less of that sense of joy and exulation that he was writing in his works all the way to the end."

The Yahoo article also notes:

Bradbury recently wrote a short essay responding to his favorite Snoopy comic strip about how much rejection he faced when he first began writing. "Starting when I was fifteen I began to send short stories to magazines like Esquire, and they, very promptly, sent them back two days before they got them! I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn't realize what a strong person I was; I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn," he wrote.

Bradbury said on his 80th birthday,

"The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me. The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was twelve. In any event, here I am, eighty years old, feeling no different, full of a great sense of joy, and glad for the long life that has been allowed me. I have good plans for the next ten or twenty years, and I hope you'll come along." 

Stephen King and Ray Bradbury:

Stephen King was born in 1947, the same year Bradbury’s first book was published.

Both King and Bradbury  have had close connections to  Hollywood, often writing scripts for their own works.

Crumley at Bradbury’s message board noted this:

There is no doubt that King is an admirer of Ray - even if his work is not really in the same vein. DANSE MACABRE makes many praising references to Ray. "My first experience of real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradbury," King writes, and describes how as a boy he listened with delightful terror to a radio play of 'Mars is Heaven'. King also comments on how Bradbury is peerless: "But for me, Bradbury lives and works alone in his own country, and his remarkable, iconoclastic style has never been successfully imitated. Vulgarly put, when God made Ray Bradbury, He broke the mold."

Elements of Bradbury's work (especially of the earlier, darker stories) can be seen in King's work - sometimes in theme (eg. the dark flipside of human nature, the way that evil is sometimes the victor), and sometimes in style (eg. black humour, eerie & surreal landsapes). To anyone who reads both authors, the influence is clear.”

Check out the 2:50 mark of Bradbury's biographer, Sam  Weller, as he discuses Bradbury's influence on Stephen King. "He told me, that it was his first encounter at the hands of fear was because of Ray Bradbury."

TELL ME YOUR FAVORITE BRADBURY STORY

I have three favorites.  First, I loved the short novel The Martian Chronicles.  Originally, Bradbury said he had a bunch of short stories about Mars, but when he came to Los Angeles, no one wanted to publish short stories.  So he wove them into a single story.  It is delightful; both novel and poetry, the writing is awesome.  For just a taste of it, check out the section titled “Rocket Summer.”

I also loved the book of short stories, The Illustrated Man.  These short stories are bound together by a mans tattoos, which are alive and moving as they tell stories.  The Velt is pretty good in that set.

And, I enjoyed his 1962 collection, R is for Rocket.  (Along the same lines as S is for Space.)  Bradbury short stories are just fun.  That’s how all his work is – delightful and fun.

The joy spills off the page and touches the reader.  He never spends (spent) long explaining how things work, he just leapt through the story itself.  I loved it!  He was very much a “don’t bother me with the details” type author.  How can a spacship do that, Mr. Bradbury?  No worries. . . he just writes on.