User:Perl~enwikibooks/Fahrenheit 451/Ray Bradbury



Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. By the time he was twelve, he had already started to write stories on sheets of butcher paper. In 1926, his family started moving back and forth from Waukegan to Tucson, Arizona before eventually settling in Los Angeles, California in 1934.

While attending Los Angeles High School, Bradbury had originally wanted to become an actor. His teachers, however, became aware of his talent with the English language and persuaded him to follow a career as a writer. He took their advice and in 1938, the same year in which he graduated from high school, Bradbury published his first short story in Imagination!



In 1941, Bradbury published his first paid piece of literature, "Pendulum," in Super Science Stories. Four years later, in 1945, Bradbury's short story, "The Big Black and White Game," was chosen to be included in Best American Short Stories. While browsing books at a book store, Bradbury met Marguerite "Maggie" McClure (1922-2003), who was one of the clerks. They fell in love and were married on September 27, 1947. Together, they had four daughters. During the same year, Bradbury published Dark Carnival, his first collection of short stories.

In 1950, Bradbury published The Martian Chronicles which established his reputation as an extremely popular science fiction writer. Three years later, Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451, one of his best known pieces of fiction.



An Apollo astronaut named a hill on the moon "Dandelion Crater" after Bradbury's novel Dandelion Wine. Some of the more conventional honors awarded to Bradbury were the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the Aviation-Space Writer's Association Award for best space article in an American magazine, the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, and an Academy Award nomination for his short film Icarus Montgolfier Wright.

Ray Bradbury currently lives in Los Angeles.

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