About the Author

When Mr. Electrico, a magician with a traveling show, came to Waukegan, Illinois during the 1920s, a twelve year-old boy was among the lucky youngsters selected for a special honor. Once Mr. Electrico tapped young Ray Bradbury on the shoulder with a sword and directed him to "live forever," the boy "was changed forever. I will grow up, [he] thought, and become like him. I will be the greatest magician who ever walked the world."

While the young Bradbury indeed spent time as an amateur magician in Waukegan, it was the magic of mastering the written word that ultimately captivated him, of capturing and, at the same time, freeing the words, spinning them into fantastic tales that entertain, perplex, frighten, stimulate thought, and inspire dreams.

The boy went on collecting his Buck Rogers and Prince Valiant comics and reading the works of H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs and when he moved with his parents and older brother to Tucson, Arizona in 1932, Ray read comic strips over the air on a radio show for children. He also began writing short stories in Tucson...

And he never stopped. In 1934 the family moved again, this time to Los Angeles. Here Ray won accolades from high school peers for his participation in and writing for theater. After graduation in 1938 he found himself a small office, sold his first story at age twenty, and before twenty-five was already selling a story a month, to Weird Tales, Mademoiselle, Collier's and others. Bradbury has since been published in such diverse publications as The Saturday Evening Post, McCall's and Harpers. An imaginative marketer of his stories, he would send and sell them to magazines that did not usually print fiction--Gourmet and Life, for example.

How many stories has he written? Who's counting? Enough to fill at least twenty published collections of his own stories. Enough to have contributed to more than seven hundred anthologies. Then there are the screenplays: among them "Moby Dick," the 1956 film based on the Herman Melville classic; "Something Wicked This Way Comes," a 1983 Disney film based on Bradbury's 1962 book of the same name; his 1948 story "the Dark Ferris; "It Came from Outer Space"; and "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" from his story "The Foghorn." There are teleplays for "Twilight Zone" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." There are stage plays and poetry. And there are his novels: his first, Fahrenheit 451 (brought to the screen by Francois Truffaut in 1966) and The Martian Chronicles (a 1980 NBC- TV mini-series).

How much has he written? Take a clue from his words: "I'm accustomed, you see, to getting up every morning, running to the typewriter, and in an hour I've created a world." And from this, his advice to aspiring young writers: to start disciplining themselves early in their careers, he says, they should put down "one or two thousand words everyday for the next twenty years."

He has garnered many awards for his writings, including one from the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Fahrenheit 451, an Academy Award nomination for a 1963 short film, "Icarus Montgolfier Wright," and a World Fantasy Award for life achievement.