Ray Bradbury

On September 27, 1947, he married Marguerite McClure in the Church of the Good Shepherd, Episcopal in Los Angeles. The couple had four daughters, Ramona, Bettina, Susan and Alexandra.

He suffered a stroke in 1999 that made wheelchair bound.

On June 5, 2012, he died in Los Angeles, California.

He was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and Ester Moberg Bradbury. His father was a lineman for telephone and power utilities.

Due to his father’s job the family stayed in Tucson, Arizona, from 1926 to 1927 and again from 1932 to 1933, and every time they returned back to Waukegan.

He was an ardent reader of adventure and fantasy fiction since childhood and spent a lot of time at ‘Carnegie library’ in Waukegan. His favourite writers included Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne among others.

He started penning down his own stories in 1931 at eleven years of age. According to him, he imitated works of Poe till he was eighteen.

Two incidents made a mark on him as a child triggering him to take up the habit of writing daily. The first one was as a three year old when he accompaned his mother to see the performance of Lon Chaney in ‘The Hunchback of Norte Dame’ while the second one was an encounter with Mr. Electrico, a carnival entertainer in 1932’.

In January 1938, his story ‘Hollerbochen's Dilemma’ was published in ‘Imagination!’ - a fanzine of Forrest J. Ackerman and the same year he completed his graduation. Since then Bradbury, fascinated by science fictional characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, began to write and publish his own science fictions in fanzines.

Ackerman funded him in July 1939 to visit New York City to attend the ‘First World Science Fiction Convention’ and also sponsored ‘Futuria Fantasia’, Bradbury’s fanzine. Four issues of the fanzine were published - restricted to 100 copies each and most of its contents were written by him.

He wrote and performed in many plays for ‘Wilshire Players Guild’ for two years beginning 1939.

His poor eyesight prohibited him from joining the army during the ‘Second World War’. He thus concentrated on his writing that saw him contributing in ‘Script’, a film magazine of Rob Wagner during 1940 to 1947.

His early earnings included $15 for ‘Pendulum’, a piece written by him and Henry Hasse and published in November 1941 in the pulp magazine, ‘Super Science Stories’.

‘Fahrenheit 451’, his best known novel was adapted into a film in 1966 by François Truffaut , performed on stage in 1979, dramatized in ’BBC Radio’ in 1982 and developed into an interactive computer game in 2010.