81 Facts About Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter.

Ray Bradbury was given the middle name "Douglas" after actor Douglas Fairbanks.

Ray Bradbury was surrounded by an extended family during his early childhood and formative years in Waukegan.

Ray Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School and was active in the drama club.

Ray Bradbury often roller-skated through Hollywood in hopes of meeting celebrities.

Ray Bradbury's first pay as a writer, at age 14, was for a joke he sold to George Burns to use on the Burns and Allen radio show.

Ray Bradbury began writing his own stories at age 12, sometimes writing on butcher paper.

The young Ray Bradbury was a cartoonist and loved to illustrate.

Ray Bradbury wrote about Tarzan and drew his own Sunday panels.

Ray Bradbury listened to the radio show Chandu the Magician, and every night when the show went off the air, he wrote out the entire script from memory.

In 1936, at a secondhand bookstore in Hollywood, Ray Bradbury discovered a handbill promoting meetings of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society.

Ray Bradbury had just graduated from high school when he met Robert Heinlein, then 31.

Ray Bradbury recounted seeing Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich and Mae West, who, he learned, made a regular appearance every Friday night, bodyguard in tow.

Ray Bradbury wrote most of its four issues, each limited to under 100 copies.

Ray Bradbury was free to start a career in writing when, owing to his bad eyesight, he was rejected for induction into the military during World War II.

Ray Bradbury was invited by Forrest J Ackerman to attend the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, which at the time met at Clifton's Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles.

In 1939, Ray Bradbury joined Laraine Day's Wilshire Players Guild, where for two years he wrote and acted in several plays.

Ray Bradbury's first paid piece, "Pendulum", written with Henry Hasse, was published in the pulp magazine Super Science Stories in November 1941, for which he earned $15.

Ray Bradbury sold his first solo story, "The Lake", for $13.75 at 22 and became a full-time writer by 24.

In UCLA's Powell Library, in a study room with typewriters for rent, Ray Bradbury wrote his classic story of a book burning future, The Fireman, which was about 25,000 words long.

Ray Bradbury attributed his lifelong habit of writing every day to two incidents.

Ray Bradbury said that had he not discovered writing, he would have become a magician.

Ray 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.

Ray Bradbury studied Eudora Welty for her "remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line".

Ray Bradbury was once described as a "Midwest surrealist" and is often labeled a science-fiction writer, which he described as "the art of the possible".

Ray Bradbury recounted when he came into his own as a writer, the afternoon he wrote a short story about his first encounter with death.

Ray Bradbury recognized he had taken the leap from emulating the many writers he admired to connecting with his voice as a writer.

In high school, Ray Bradbury was active in the poetry and drama clubs.

Ray 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.

Ray Bradbury did not consider science critical to his writing, but 'incidental' to it.

Ray Bradbury claimed to not be overinterested in the development of science, but hoped to use it as a form of social commentary and as an allegorical technique.

Ray Bradbury wrote many short essays on culture and the arts, attracting the attention of critics in this field, using his fiction to explore and criticize his culture and society.

Ray Bradbury observed, for example, that Fahrenheit 451 touched on the alienation of people by media:.

Ray Bradbury stated that the novel worked as a critique of the later development of political correctness:.

On May 24,1956, Ray Bradbury appeared on television in Hollywood on the popular quiz show You Bet Your Life hosted by Groucho Marx.

Ray Bradbury was a consultant for the American Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair and wrote the narration script for The American Journey attraction there.

Ray Bradbury worked on the original exhibit in Epcot's Spaceship Earth geosphere at Walt Disney World.

Ray Bradbury was a strong supporter of public library systems, raising money to prevent the closure of several libraries in California facing budgetary cuts.

The comics featuring Ray Bradbury's stories included Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Crime Suspenstories, and Haunt of Fear.

Ray Bradbury remained an enthusiastic playwright all his life, leaving a rich theatrical legacy as well as literary.

Ray Bradbury headed the Pandemonium Theatre Company in Los Angeles for many years, and had a five-year relationship with the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena.

Ray Bradbury's legacy was celebrated by the bookstore Fahrenheit 451 Books in Laguna Beach, California, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ray Bradbury lived in his parents' home until he was 27 and married.

Ray Bradbury's wife was Marguerite McClure, from 1947 until her death.

Ray Bradbury never obtained a driver's license, but relied on public transportation or his bicycle.

Ray Bradbury was raised Baptist by his parents, who were themselves infrequent churchgoers.

Ray Bradbury was a close friend of Charles Addams, and Addams illustrated the first of Ray Bradbury's stories about the Elliotts, a family that resembled Addams' own Addams Family placed in rural Illinois.

In October 2001, Ray Bradbury published all the Family stories he had written in one book with a connecting narrative, From the Dust Returned, featuring a wraparound Addams cover of the original "Homecoming" illustration.

Late in life, Ray Bradbury retained his dedication and passion despite what he described as the "devastation of illnesses and deaths of many good friends".

Ray Bradbury suffered a stroke in 1999 that left him partially dependent on a wheelchair.

Ray Bradbury made regular appearances at science-fiction conventions until 2009, when he retired from the circuit.

Ray Bradbury chose a burial place at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, with a headstone that reads "Author of Fahrenheit 451".

On February 6,2015, The New York Times reported that the house Ray Bradbury lived and wrote in for 50 years, at 10265 Cheviot Drive in Cheviot Hills, Los Angeles, California, had been demolished by the buyer, architect Thom Mayne.

Ray Bradbury called Ronald Reagan "the greatest president" whereas he dismissed Bill Clinton, calling him a "shithead".

Ray Bradbury later criticized Barack Obama for ending NASA's crewed space flight program.

Ray Bradbury was against affirmative action, condemned what he called "all this political correctness that's rampant on campuses", and called for a ban of quotas in higher education.

Ray Bradbury died in Los Angeles, California on June 5,2012, at the age of 91, after a lengthy illness.

The Washington Post noted several modern-day technologies that Ray Bradbury had envisioned much earlier, such as the idea of banking ATMs and earbuds and Bluetooth headsets in Fahrenheit 451, and the concepts of artificial intelligence in I Sing the Body Electric.

Ray Bradbury authored "more than 27 novels and story collections", which included many of his 600 short stories.

Ray Bradbury took a Greyhound bus to New York and checked into a room at the YMCA for 50 cents a night.

Ray Bradbury took his short stories to a dozen publishers, but no one wanted them.

Just before getting ready to go home, Ray Bradbury had dinner with an editor at Doubleday.

When Ray Bradbury recounted that everyone wanted a novel and he did not have one, the editor, coincidentally named Walter Ray Bradbury, asked if the short stories might be tied together into a book-length collection.

Ray Bradbury took it to the Doubleday editor the next morning, who read it and wrote Bradbury a check for $750.

When Ray Bradbury returned to Los Angeles, he connected all the short stories that became The Martian Chronicles.

The core of the work was Ray Bradbury's witnessing of the American small-town life in the American heartland.

Later, in 2006, Ray Bradbury published the original novel remaining after the extraction, and retitled it Farewell Summer.

Also in the early 1950s, adaptations of Ray Bradbury's stories were televised in several anthology shows, including Tales of Tomorrow, Lights Out, Out There, Suspense, CBS Television Workshop, Jane Wyman's Fireside Theatre, Star Tonight, Windows and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Bradbury's close friend Ray Harryhausen produced the stop-motion animation of the creature.

Ray Bradbury later returned the favor by writing a short story "Tyrannosaurus Rex" about a stop-motion animator who strongly resembled Harryhausen.

Ray Bradbury was hired in 1953 by director John Huston to work on the screenplay for his film version of Melville's Moby Dick, which stars Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, Richard Basehart as Ishmael, and Orson Welles as Father Mapple.

Oskar Werner and Julie Christie starred in Fahrenheit 451, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel directed by Francois Truffaut.

In 1966, Ray Bradbury helped Lynn Garrison create AVIAN, a specialist aviation magazine.

Voiceover actor Paul Frees provided narration, while Ray Bradbury was responsible for the opening voiceover; Greg Hansen and Roger Hoffman scored the episodes.

Ray Bradbury made a film adaptation of The Veldt in 1987.

Ray Bradbury wrote and narrated the 1993 animated television version of The Halloween Tree, based on his 1972 novel.

Ray Bradbury expressed displeasure with Moore's use of the title, but stated that his resentment was not politically motivated, though Ray Bradbury was conservative-leaning politically.

Ray Bradbury asserted that he did not want any of the money made by the movie, nor did he believe that he deserved it.

Ray Bradbury pressured Moore to change the name, but to no avail.

In 2008, the film Ray Bradbury's Chrysalis was produced by Roger Lay Jr.

The revamped Ray Bradbury Award replaced the Nebula Award for Best Script.