Ray Bradbury

 Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into television shows or films.

Bradbury was born in 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, to Esther (Moberg) Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant, and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a power and telephone lineman of English descent. He was given the middle name "Douglas," after the actor, Douglas Fairbanks.

Between 1926 and 1933, the Bradbury family moved back and forth between Waukegan and Tucson, Arizona. In 1931, at age eleven, young Ray began writing his own stories.

When the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1934, Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School and was active in the drama club. Among the creative and talented people Bradbury met this way were special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen and radio star George Burns. Bradbury's first pay as a writer was at the age of fourteen, when Burns hired him to write for the Burns and Allen show.

His first published story was "Hollerbochen's Dilemma", which appeared in the fanzine Imagination! in January, 1938.

In 1939 Bradbury joined Laraine Day's Wilshire Players Guild where for two years he wrote and acted in several plays. Bradbury's first paid piece, "Pendulum," written with Henry Hasse, was published in the pulp magazine Super Science Stories in November 1941, for which he earned $15.

Bradbury sold his first story, "The Lake", for $13.75 at the age of twenty-two. He became a full-time writer by the end of 1942. His first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947.

Besides his fiction work, Bradbury wrote many short essays on the arts and culture. Bradbury also hosted "The Ray Bradbury Theater" which was based on his short stories. Bradbury was a consultant for the American Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair and the original exhibit housed in Epcot's Spaceship Earth geosphere at Walt Disney World. In the 1980s, Bradbury concentrated on detective fiction.

Bradbury remained an enthusiastic playwright all his life, leaving a rich theatrical legacy as well as literary.