Ray Bradbury

Biography

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, and spent his childhood in the public library after his family couldn't afford books. He never attended college — the library was his university. He sold newspapers to buy science fiction magazines. When he began writing seriously, he was too poor to rent a typewriter, so he wrote 'The Fireman' (the story that became Fahrenheit 451) in the basement of the UCLA library on a coin-operated typewriter at ten cents per half hour, feeding dimes to the machine. He produced the novella in nine days for $9.80. The irony — writing a novel about the destruction of libraries inside a library — was not lost on him and became central to how he discussed the book for the rest of his life. The novel was published as McCarthyism swept through American institutions and the House Un-American Activities Committee was blacklisting artists, writers, and professors. Bradbury insisted the book was not primarily about government censorship but about television destroying the appetite for reading — a distinction he maintained with some stubbornness even as the political reading gained dominance.

Ray Bradbury at a glance