Ray Bradbury :: essays research papers

Ray Bradbury Ray Bradbury has been considered one of America’s greatest science-fiction writer’s. His work often satires human nature and shows his reader’s the flaws found deep within the individual. Not only is Bradbury a novelist, but he is also a , short-story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and poet Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22, 1920, the third son of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury. In 1926 Ray Bradbury's family moved from Waukegan, Illinois to Tucson, Arizona, only to return to Waukegan again in May 1927. By 1931 (the dawn of the Great Depression) he began writing his own stories on butcher paper. In 1932, after his father was laid off his job as a telephone lineman, the Bradbury family again moved to Tucson and again returned to Waukegan the following year. In 1934 the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California. Bradbury graduated from a Los Angeles High School in 1938. His formal education ended there, but he furthered it by himself. He went to the library by night and by day at he worked at his typewriter. He sold newspapers on Los Angeles street corners from 1938 to 1942. Bradbury's first story publication was "Hollerbochen's Dilemma," printed in 1938 in Imagination!, an amateur fan magazine. In 1939, Bradbury published four issues of Futuria Fantasia, his own fan magazine, contributing much of the published material himself. Bradbury's first paid publication was "Pendulum" in 1941 to Super Science Stories. In 1942 Bradbury wrote "The Lake," a short story later added to a collection of short stories called The October Country. This was the story in which Bradbury discovered his distinctive writing style. By 1943 he had given up his job selling newspapers and began writing full-time, contributing numerous short stories to periodicals. In 1945 his short story "The Big Black and White Game" was selected for Best American Short Stories. In 1947 Bradbury married Marguerite McClure, and that same year he gathered much of his best material and published them as , his first short story collection. His reputation as a leading writer of science fiction was established with the publication of in 1950 (published in England under the title The Silver Locusts), which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, the constant thwarting of their efforts by the gentle, telepathic Martians, the eventual colonization, and finally the effect on the Martian settlers of a massive nuclear war on Earth. As much a work of social criticism as of science fiction, The Martian Chronicles reflects some of the prevailing anxieties of America in the early