Ray Bradbury

The editor would like to thank the contributors for their participation in the project, their patience, and their enduring commitment. I would also like to thank series editor Simon Bacon, who, when I mentioned in passing that I was a huge Bradbury fan, said he had a proposal for me to make a proposal to him for this series. Simon has been incredibly enthusiastic and supportive, and even contributed to the volume. Similarly, Laurel Plapp, our editor at Peter Lang, and the other editorial and production staff at that fine publisher have been wonderfully supportive and patient. Thanks as well to the readers and peer reviewers who worked to strengthen the volume.

I would like to extend my gratitude to my family: Lacy, Kevin III, and Cordelia, who put up with a daddy who had to go edit, answer emails, and also write an essay himself, and gave support and encouragement. Thanks to Dr. David Wylie III, Ph.D., one of the dedicatees of this volume, who introduced me to Something Wicked This Way Comes in seventh grade, thus leading to a lifelong love of Bradbury. Lastly, thanks to Ray himself, whom I had the good fortune to meet several times and who was always warm, encouraging, larger-than-life, and profoundly human. His work has made the world a better place.

I had just started seventh grade and was already logging a lot of time in my middle school library. It was in one of those schools where very few kids ever went to the library voluntarily. I wished I could live there.

The librarian—Miss Smith—encouraged my love of reading and my desire to become a writer. She had some literary aspirations as well and was involved with several groups of writers including PSFS (The Philadelphia Science Fiction Society), The Hyborean Legion (local sword-and-sorcery writers—a group anchored by George Scithers and L. Sprague de Camp), and a considerable more informal group of pro writers that met in New York.

Miss Smith had me get permission from my family to accompany her to meetings of all three groups, but it was the group in New York that would most significantly impact both my desire to write and my understanding of what “being a writer meant.”

That group was not an official organization. This was 1970, and when a genre writer of note was launching a new book, he or she went to New York for the kick-off. The event was a semi-regular monthly cocktail party/networking session hosted by a publisher in his penthouse. The lineup of who was there at any given session changed regularly. However, there was some who made an effort to attend as often as they could. This included some heavy hitters from California.

The very first time Miss Smith took me up there, I met Richard Matheson, Leigh Brackett, Harlan Ellison … and Ray Bradbury.

Alas, at that point I had not yet “discovered” Bradbury’s works. I was more focused on Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ed McBain, Murray Leinster, and Robert E. Howard. So, when the librarian said–in a somewhat awed voice–that “And this is Ray Bradbury!,” my response was, “Oh, are you a writer, too?”

Ray Bradbury was one of the best-known writers of our time. In the early decades of his seventy-year career, he became a widely read master of fantasy, suspense, magical realism, and his own rather unique brand of science fiction. He was a writer who, with others, was central to bringing science fiction into the literary mainstream. Bradbury never attended college, yet he became one of the best-known space-age visionaries. In a broader sense, he was perhaps one of the most prominent authors to successfully navigate the tenuous boundary between literature and popular culture, a form of success not always appreciated by literary critics. Most of his books and stories remain in print today and are read in many languages around the world.

I have offered similar legacy summaries in my three-volume Bradbury biography, in introductions to various editions of his works, and in spoken presentations beyond count. The collection of new scholarly essays found here in Ray Bradbury: A Companion suggests a more meaningful way to view Ray Bradbury’s legacy, and that is through the eyes of some of the prominent writers, critics, scholars, and intellectuals who found wonder and value in his work.

Bradbury never followed the traditional rules of genre fiction, and by the mid-century his poetic, metaphor-rich prose was consistently surfacing in the major market magazines. Even before his May 1950 breakout with The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury was attracting the interest of many mainstream literary figures who were already subjects of literary scholarship.

For years, Nobel laureate John Steinbeck read Bradbury’s stories to his sons. Truman Capote, a frequent visitor to the editorial offices of Mademoiselle, singled out Bradbury’s “The Homecoming” from a stack of submissions; it would soon be featured in the October 1946 issue. Gore Vidal felt that The Martian Chronicles exemplified Bradbury’s special talent for creating worlds with intricate pasts and mysterious futures. Carl Sandburg recognized the originality of his work. Bradbury’s correspondents included Vidal, Jessamyn West, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Anaïs Nin, Loren Eiseley, Renaissance scholar Bernard Berenson, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Hillyer.

The British expatriate modernist Christopher Isherwood wrote influential essays on The Martian Chronicles in America and in England, where it was initially titled The Silver Locusts. Through Isherwood, Bradbury quickly came to the attention of prominent British writers, including Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden. Welsh poet Dylan Thomas ranked Bradbury among his favorite fantasy writers. Both Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell and novelist-critic Kingsley Amis regarded Fahrenheit 451 as one of the great cautionary tales of the postwar world.

Younger literary figures inspired by Bradbury included Richard Bach and dark fantasy and horror writers Charles Beaumont, Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, R. L. Stine, and Clive Barker. Pulitzer winner Michael Chabon was deeply moved by “The Rocket Man,” a story that led lyricist Bernie Taupin to write Elton John’s 1972 hit song of the same title. Stephen King devoted a chapter to Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes in Danse Macabre (1981), King’s book-length study of the American Gothic tradition. Historian and political philosopher Russell Kirk penned a significant chapter on Bradbury in Enemies of the Permanent Things (1969), placing Bradbury among such mythopoeic writers as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.

The ever-growing number of prominent literary readers ran roughly parallel with the rise of Bradbury’s presence in the classroom. By the end of the twentieth century, his stories had appeared in more than six hundred different English language textbooks, with hundreds more in various foreign language textbooks overseas. By contrast, the rise of literary scholarship on Bradbury evolved more slowly. Early beacons included Jorge Luis Borges’s often reprinted Spanish language prologue to the 1955 Argentinean edition of The Martian Chronicles (the Borges prologue was later included with the digitized Chronicles sent to Mars aboard the Phoenix Lander in 2008).

Two pioneering scholarly essays on Bradbury were published in France, where Bradbury’s surrealism continues to be highly praised: Michel Carrouges, “Ray Bradbury, les martiens, et nous” (Monde Nouveau 79, May 1954), and Michel Deutsch, “Ray Bradbury et la poésie du futur” (Critique 22, July 1957). William F. Touponce published similar explorations of Bradbury’s fantasies with “The Existential Fabulous” (Mosaic 13:3–4, Spring–Summer 1980) and “Some Aspects of Surrealism in the Work of Ray Bradbury” (Extrapolation 25.3, Fall 1984).