Ray Bradbury : biography

Ray Bradbury married rather late – at the age of twenty seven, and this marriage was very successful. Margaret McClure was a good expert in literature, good wines and cats, she knew four foreign languages and had an original sense of humor. She gave birth to four daughters and not only loved her husband, but managed to appreciate his talent – since the wedding she worked very hard so that Ray could be at home and write books. It was Margaret, who printed the first copy of “Martian chronicles”, and Bradbury dedicated this book to her.

His next work was a novel “Fahrenheit 451”, published in 1953 – it was a scary warning and even a prophecy about civilization’s destiny. This book made Ray Bradbury famous all over the world.

Bradbury was practically brought up in Hollywood, and when he was a teenager, he was hunting for autographs in cinema studios. It isn’t surprising, that prose of the person, who was brought up on classical films, was very cinematic. In 1966 a French Francois Truffaut made a film on a famous Bradbury’s novel. It was the first, but not the last Bradbury’s filming. Besides, the writer wrote a lot of scripts during his life.

The talent is often many-sided, and Bradbury was a poet, an architect and an artist too. Twenty collections of his poetry was published in USA. The writer’s ideas were used during the building of a trade centre “Horton Plaza” in a Californian city San-Diego – a hundred and forty million dollars were spent on it, and this money was more than compensated.

But books were the main things in Bradbury’s life, of course. He was a stay-at-home, he was afraid of cars, but had an incredible speed of though, he claimed that he didn’t predicted the future, but wanted to prevent it. He became a live classic of science fiction, a founder of many traditions of science fiction, and his books are not only full of brilliant fantasy – they are real philosophic prose, real literature. Bradbury’s books were published practically every year, and the last novel of the great writer “Goodbye, summer!” was published in 2006.

The last several years of life the writer was wheelchair-bound. He died in Los Angeles on the 5th of June in 2012.

Ray Bradbury’s gravestone has a writing “Fahrenheit 451”, as the writer wished. And he also entrusted those who would come to his grave t leave apples for ghosts…