Jel Bello Amanecer

dbury was born in 1920[2] in Waukegan, Illinois,[3] to Esther (Moberg) Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant, and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury,[4] a power and telephone lineman of English descent.[5] He was given the middle name "Douglas," after the actor Douglas Fairbanks.

Hometown[edit]

Ray Bradbury was surrounded by a loving extended family during his early childhood and formative years in Waukegan. This period provided foundations for both the author and his stories. In Bradbury's works of fiction, 1920s Waukegan becomes "Green Town," Illinois. In his stories, Green Town is a symbol of safety and home, which is often juxtaposed as a contrasting backdrop to tales of fantasy or menace. It serves as the setting of his modern classics Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Farewell Summer. In Green Town, Bradbury's favorite uncle sprouts wings, traveling carnivals conceal supernatural powers, and his grandparents provide room and board to Charles Dickens.[6] Perhaps the most definitive usage of the pseudonym for his hometown, in Summer Morning, Summer Night, a collection of short stories and vignettes exclusively about Green Town, Bradbury returns to the signature locale as a look back at the rapidly disappearing small-town world of the American heartland, which was the foundation of his roots.

Between 1926 and 1933, the Bradbury family moved back and forth between Waukegan and Tucson, Arizona. In 1931, at age eleven, young Ray began writing his own stories. The country was going through the Great Depression, and sometimes Bradbury wrote on butcher paper.

The Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1934.

Bradbury was related to the American Shakespeare scholar Douglas Spaulding.[7] He was also descended from Mary Bradbury, who was tried at one of the Salem witch trials in 1692.[8] She was married to Captain Thomas Bradbury of Salisbury, Massachusetts.[citation needed]

Influences, process and background[edit]

Hollywood[edit]

The Bradbury family lived in Tucson, Arizona, in 1926–1927 and 1932–1933 as the father pursued employment, each time returning to Waukegan, but eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1934, when Bradbury was 14. The family arrived with only 40 dollars, which paid for rent and food until his father finally found a job making wire at a cable company for $14 a week. This meant they could stay and Bradbury, who was in love with Hollywood, was ecstatic.

The family lived about four blocks from the Uptown Theater on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, the flagship theater for MGM and Fox. There, Bradbury learned how to sneak in and watched previews almost every week. He roller-skated there as well as all over town, as he put it "hell-bent on getting autographs from glamorous stars. It was glorious." Among stars the young Bradbury was thrilled to encounter were Norma Shearer, Laurel and Hardy, and Ronald Colman. Sometimes he would spend all day in front of Paramount Pictures or Columbia Pictures and then skate to the Brown Derby to watch the stars who came and went for meals. He recounted seeing Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich and Mae West, who he would learn made a regular appearance every Friday night, bodyguard in tow.[9]

Literature[edit]

Bradbury was a reader and writer throughout his youth.[10] He knew as a young boy that he was "going into one of the arts."

In 1932, one of Bradbury's earliest influences was Edgar Allan Poe. At age twelve, Bradbury began writing traditional horror stories and said he tried to imitate Poe until he was about eighteen. At the time, his favorites were also Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter, as well as comic books. He listened to the radio show Chandu the Magician, and when the show went off the air every night he would sit and write the entire script from memory.

In his youth, he spent much time in the Carnegie library in Waukegan, reading such authors as H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan of the Apes.[11] He loved Burroughs' The Warlord of Mars so much that at the age of 12 he wrote his own sequel.[12] The young Bradbury was also a cartoonist and loved to illustrate. He wrote about Tarzan and drew his own Sunday panels.

When he was seventeen, Bradbury read stories published in Astounding Science Fiction, and said he read everything by Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and A. E. van Vogt, but cited H. G. Wells and Jules Verne as his big science fiction influences. Bradbury identified with Verne, saying, "He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally." [13]

Bradbury admitted he stopped reading genre books in his twenties and embraced a broad field of literature that included Alexander Pope and poet John Donne.[14]

An aunt read him short stories when he was a child.[15] He used this library as a setting for much of his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, and depicted Waukegan as "Green Town" in some of his other semi-autobiographical novels — Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer — as well as in many of his short stories.[16]

He attributed to two incidents his lifelong habit of writing every day. The first of these, occurring when he was three years old, was his mother's taking him to see Lon Chaney's performance in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.[17] The second incident occurred in 1932, when a carnival entertainer, one Mr. Electrico,[18] touched the young man on the nose with an electrified sword, made his hair stand on end, and shouted, "Live forever!" Bradbury remarked, "I felt that something strange and wonderful had happened to me because of my encounter with Mr. Electrico...[he] gave me a future...I began to write, full-time. I have written every single day of my life since that day 69 years ago."[19] It was at that age that Bradbury first started to do magic, which was his first great love. If he had not discovered writing, he would have become a magician.[20]

Bradbury claimed a wide variety of influences, and described discussions he might have with his favorite poets and writers Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Wolfe. From Steinbeck, he said he learned "how to write objectively and yet insert all of the insights without too much extra comment." He studied Eudora Welty for her "remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line." Bradbury's favorite writers growing up included Katherine Anne Porter, who wrote about the American South, Edith Wharton, and Jessamyn West.[21] He often said he was a fantasy writer, not a science fiction writer, and numerous times is quoted stating "The only science fiction I've written is Fahrenheit 451", elucidating "science fiction is the art of the possible." Bradbury recounted when he came into his own as a writer, the afternoon he wrote a short story about his first encounter with death. When he was a boy, he met a young girl at the beach and she went out into the water and never came back. Years later, as he wrote about it, tears flowed from him. He recognized he had taken the leap from emulating the many writers he admired to connecting with his voice as a writer.[22][23]

When later asked about the lyrical power of his prose, Bradbury replied, "From reading so much poetry every day of my life. My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well." He is quoted, "If you're reluctant to weep, you won't live a full and complete life."[24]

In high school, Ray Bradbury was active in both the Poetry Club and the Drama club, continuing plans to become an actor but becoming serious about his writing as his high school years progressed. Bradbury graduated from Los Angeles High School, where he took poetry classes with Snow Longley Housh, and short story writing courses taught by Jeannet Johnson.[25] The teachers recognized his talent and furthered his interest in writing,[26] but he did not attend college. Instead, he sold newspapers at the corner of South Norton Avenue and Olympic Boulevard. In regard to his education, Bradbury said:

Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.[27][28]

He told The Paris Review, "You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t."[29]

It was in UCLA's Powell Library, in a study room with typewriters for rent, that Bradbury wrote his classic story of a book-burning future, The Fireman, which was about 25,000 words long. It was later published at about 50,000 words under the name Fahrenheit 451, for a total cost of $9.80, due to the library's typewriter-rental fees of ten cents per half-hour.[30]

Career[edit]

Cover of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Ballantine Books No. 41, First Edition, 1953.

When the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1934, Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School and was active in the drama club. Bradbury often roller-skated through Hollywood in hopes of meeting celebrities. Among the creative and talented people Bradbury met this way were special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen and radio star George Burns. Bradbury's first pay as a writer was at the age of fourteen,

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