Themes in Literature/Isolation and Community/Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury is one of the best-known 20th Century fantasy, horror, and science-fiction writers in the United States. He is famous for his novel Fahrenheit 451 and the short story collections The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. (See the Recommended Reading section at the end for more information on these works).

Bradbury was born in Waukegan, a small town in Illinois, in 1920, and lived most of his life in Los Angeles, California, where he died in 2012. A writer with unlimited imagination, Bradbury was interested in science, especially in life in other planets, though he “challenged the limits of the science fiction itself” by adding fantastical notions and a lyrical tone to his stories, which “restored wonder to a genre that, without him, might have proven dull, indeed.” While he specialized in narratives, Bradbury also wrote drama, poetry, and even musical compositions. Several of his works have been translated to many languages around the world.