Ray Douglas Bradbury (US: BRAD-berr-ee; 22 August 1920 – 5 June 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.
Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).
The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".
Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to Esther (née Moberg) Bradbury (1888–1966), a Swedish immigrant, and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury (1890–1957), a power and telephone lineman of English ancestry. He was given the middle name "Douglas" after actor Douglas Fairbanks.
Bradbury was surrounded by an extended family during his early childhood and formative years in Waukegan. His grandparents lived next door, and an aunt read him short stories when he was a child. This period provided foundations for both the author and his stories. In Bradbury's fiction, 1920s Waukegan becomes Green Town, Illinois.
The Bradbury family lived in Tucson, Arizona, during 1926–1927 and 1932–1933 while their father pursued employment, each time returning to Waukegan. While in Tucson, Bradbury attended Amphi Junior High School and Roskruge Junior High School. They eventually settled in Los Angeles in 1934 when Bradbury was 14. The family arrived with only US$40 (equivalent to $963 in 2025), which paid for rent and food until his father finally found a job making wire at a cable company for $14 a week (equivalent to $337 in 2025), allowing them to stay in Hollywood.
Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School and was active in the drama club. He often roller-skated through Hollywood in hopes of meeting celebrities. Among the creative people he met were special-effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen and radio star George Burns. 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.
Bradbury was fascinated with carnivals from a young age, and they would feature in such works as The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He related a formative event of his youth:
I suppose the most important memory is of Mr. Electrico. On Labor Day weekend, 1932, when I was twelve years old, he came to my hometown with the Dill Brothers ... He was a performer sitting in an electric chair and a stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. I sat below, in the front row, and he reached down with a flaming sword full of electricity and he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose and he cried, "Live, forever!" And I thought, "God, that's wonderful. How do you do that?" ... So when I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of "Beautiful Ohio" and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks because I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. And so I went home and within days I started to write. And I've never stopped.
Throughout his youth, Bradbury was an avid reader and writer and knew at a young age that he was "going into one of the arts". Bradbury began writing his own stories at age 12 (1931), sometimes writing on butcher paper.
In his youth, he spent much time in the Carnegie Library in Waukegan, reading such authors as H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. At 12, he began writing traditional horror stories and said he tried to imitate Poe until he was about 18. Bradbury's favorite writers growing up included Katherine Anne Porter, Edith Wharton, and Jessamyn West. He loved the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially his John Carter of Mars series; The Warlord of Mars impressed him so much that at age 12, he wrote his own sequel. The young Bradbury was also a cartoonist and loved to illustrate. He wrote about Tarzan and drew his own Sunday panels. He 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.
As a teen in Beverly Hills, he often visited his mentor and friend, science-fiction writer Bob Olsen, sharing ideas and maintaining contact. In 1936, at a secondhand bookstore in Hollywood, Bradbury discovered a handbill promoting meetings of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. Excited to find others who shared his interest, he joined a Thursday-night conclave at age 16.
Bradbury cited Verne and Wells as his primary science-fiction influences. He 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." Bradbury admitted that he stopped reading science-fiction books in his 20s and embraced a broad field of literature that included poets Alexander Pope and John Donne. He had just graduated from high school when he met Robert A. Heinlein, then 31. Bradbury recalled: "He was well known, and he wrote humanistic science fiction, which influenced me to dare to be human instead of mechanical." During his young adulthood, Bradbury read stories published in Astounding Science Fiction and read everything by Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and A. E. van Vogt.
As a child, Bradbury collected Tarzan and Buck Rogers comic books, for which he was ridiculed in school. As a teenager, he discovered interest in Superman: "I recognized myself when I saw him in his reporter's outfit, bloodying his nose as he blundered into that phone booth."
The family lived about four blocks from the Fox Uptown Theatre 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 spent all day in front of Paramount Pictures or Columbia Pictures, then skated 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 learned, made a regular appearance every Friday night, bodyguard in tow.
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. Inspired by science-fiction heroes such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, he began publishing science-fiction stories in fanzines in 1938. He 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. There he met Robert A. Heinlein, Emil Petaja, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett and Jack Williamson. Bradbury's first published story was "Hollerbochen's Dilemma", in the January 1938 number of Ackerman's fanzine Imagination!. In July 1939, Ackerman and his girlfriend Morojo gave 19-year-old Bradbury the money to head to New York for the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York City, and funded Bradbury's fanzine, Futuria Fantasia. Bradbury wrote most of its four issues, each volume printed in limited number due to publishing costs. Between 1940 and 1947, he was a contributor to Rob Wagner's film magazine, Script.