Ray Duglas Bradbury (1920)

Ray Bradbury is an American author of many imaginative science-fiction short stories, novels and plays. Ray Bradbury was born on August 22,1920, in the town of Wokehan, Illinois, into the family of an electric plant worker. His mother was a devoted cinema fan, and Ray got his second name after his mother’s favourite actor, a mute cinema star Duglas Furnbanks.

The impressions which made up the boy’s spiritual food were provided by books, cinema and circus. They determined the future writer’s inner world. At twelve Ray helped his father to support the family, reading stories for children on the radio every Saturday.

At the same time he began writing stories about the Red Planet, Mars – one after another, quickly, happily, enjoying his own fantasy.

By the time the young man left school he had already become a writer. Bradbury’s literary taste and personal ideas were greatly influenced by Edgar Burroughs, on the one hand, and Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolf, on the other hand. His first book of short stories was published in 1941 and was an immediate success. By the middle of 1940s he was already a short-story writer with a certain reputation.

Yet it was “Martian Chronocles” that brought him the world recognition. Ray Bradbury himself called this novel “an accidental novel”. His other famous novels are “Dandelion Wine”, “Farenheit 451°” and “Something Wicked This Way Come”. Bradbury worked in the genre of a short fantasy story mostly.

But what makes all of his works so deep and thrilling is his firm belief in spiritual riches of a human soul that endures and survives.

Ray Bradbury created his own universe according to his own poetic imagination.