Dandelion Wine (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Ray Bradbury was born to Leonard Spaulding and Esther Moberg Bradbury on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. He spent his formative childhood years in Waukegan, the town that became the basis for “Green Town,” and the setting for several of his stories and novels.

In 1926, the family moved to Tucson, Arizona, where Bradbury’s younger sister was born. She died of pneumonia in 1927, and the family returned to Waukegan. The family again moved to Tucson in 1932, only to return in 1933; their last move, however, was to Los Angeles in 1934, where Bradbury has lived ever since.

Bradbury fell in love with Hollywood during his teenage years, and spent much of his time trying to get a glimpse of his favorite screen and radio stars at their studios. He handed George Burns a script for his show every week until finally Burns used a small bit to close his show.

After graduation from high school, Bradbury pursued his writing, selling newspapers on street corners to support himself through 1942. His first professional publication, “Pendulum,” appeared in Super Science Stories in 1941, the same year that he attended renowned science fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s writing classes. By 1945, Bradbury was writing full time and placing stories in both science fiction “pulp” magazines as well as such mainstream publications as McCall’s. During the late 1940s, he also began earning the kind of critical acclaim that would continue throughout his career. His stories regularly appeared in The Best American Short Stories, and he won an O. Henry award in 1947.

In the 1950s, Bradbury became a major American writer. In addition to publishing collections of short stories including The Martian Chronicles in 1950 and The Illustrated Man in 1951, he also brought his novel Fahrenheit 451 to print in 1953. During this time, Bradbury continued to work as a dramatic writer as well, composing radio adaptations of his stories, television dramas, and the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick. In 1957, Bradbury finally published a novel he had been working on for nearly a decade, Dandelion Wine, a book that was later adapted as a full-length musical drama. The book drew heavily on Bradbury’s own childhood in Waukegan, Illinois.

Over the next four decades, Bradbury continued to work prolifically, producing many collections of stories, screenplays, teleplays, voiceover narrations for documentaries and movies, essays, nonfiction books, speeches, lyrics, and poems. For his effort, he won awards, including (among many others) the Aviation Space Writers Association Award (1968, 1979); the Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Association (1977); the Jules Verne Award (1984); Body of Work Award from PEN (1985); National Book Foundation’s 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; and the National Medal of the Arts (2004). The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him a Grand Master. Bradbury also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Although Bradbury suffered a stroke in 1999, he continued to write and publish work, including One More for the Road (2002), a collection of short stories; several collections of poetry; and the 2003 novel, Let’s All Kill Constance.