Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,528

This is the grave of Ray Bradbury.

Born in 1920 in Waukegan, Wisconsin, grew up in a working class family. He grew up mostly in Wisconsin as well, but with a couple of sojourns in Arizona where his parents moved in search of employment. Then in 1934, the family moved permanently to Los Angeles. Bradbury was a big reader and writer and at the age of 14, he sold a joke to George Burns, starting his writing career. The science fiction author Bob Olsen came to know the boy and he took Bradbury under his wing. Bradbury was interested in science fiction as well and started writing it. When he was rejected for World War II due to his terrible eyesight, he decided to go all-in on his writing. Worked out pretty well.

For the late 30s and early 40s, really through the war, Bradbury wrote a variety of things and acted where he could too, mostly in small plays. But he sold his first story, “The Lake,” in 1942 and by 1944, was mostly supporting himself by writing. He published his first short story collection, Dark Carnival, in 1947. This was just a small publisher and later many of these stories would be republished when Bradbury became more famous. That happened in a pretty lucky way. He submitted a story to Mademoiselle. It was just in a pile with a bunch of bad stuff. But an editorial assistant started looking through these, no doubt with great misery reading this crap, and then was like, wait a minute, this one is really good! That young editorial assistant was Truman Capote. The story got published and then was in the competition for the O. Henry Award.

So Bradbury’s star was starting to form. He randomly ran into Christopher Isherwood at a book story and convinced the writer to read his work. Isherwood agreed for some reason and he gave the 1950 book The Martian Chronicles a rave review. Bradbury then wrote a story called “The Fireman” in 1951. It did well and so he decided to extend it into a novel after a guy at Ballantine Books named Stanley Kauffmann thought it would work well. Kauffmann of course later became the long-time film critic at The New Republic. Lot of random names in Bradbury’s early career! This became Fahrenheit 451, named for the temperature at which book paper burns. That was published in 1953 and became one of the most important works of literature and certainly of science fiction ever published in this country. Not surprisingly, the right-wingers hated since they were pretty into the idea of burning books and it was banned in many school districts, as well as in the entire nation of South Africa. It has been adapted many times for the screen, most notably by Francois Truffaut in 1966, a version I like a good deal.

I am not a science fiction person in general, but I do recognize that the best of the genre is incredibly important for the history of American literature and people such as Bradbury and LeGuin are critically important figures and, frankly, people whose work I should engage. He continued to work and probably the most important book after Fahrenheit 451 was 1962’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a mix of fantasy and horror. This has been adapted a few times, often for the theater, and once for a big movie with Jason Robards and Diane Ladd, among others. Bradbury’s books had popularity across the world. Dandelion Wine, never translated into the screen in an English speaking country, does have a Russian film adaptation from 1997.

By 1956, Bradbury was just in that right point of sorta fame to be featured on You Bet Your Life. He was hired to consult on the American Pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and for Epcot’s Spaceship Earth. Always interested in keeping at least marginal control over his own work, he often at least consulted on the scripts for the adaptations of his material and hosted The Ray Bradbury Theater that adapted his short stories for the small screen. He was a pretty good guy about this stuff. Since comics and science fiction had rampant plagiarism of ideas and characters as a problem back in the old days (less so today I think though I am not an expert), when EC Comics just openly ripped him off, he sent them a letter basically saying “c’mon guys, I don’t really mind this, but show at least a little respect here” and they agreed to pay him instead of stealing from him. Reasonable.

At first, Bradbury’s politics were pretty centrist. But he moved to the right as he got older and after LBJ botched Vietnam, he became a committed Republican, even when Nixon was just as bad. Bradbury’s later politics were terrible. He was a real crank in the end. He came to claim that Fahrenheit 451 was a good metaphor for the horrors of “political correctness.” Uh, OK. He went on, “Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can’t say certain things. The homosexual groups don’t want you to criticize them. It’s thought control and freedom of speech control.” Christ, what an asshole. It gets better. He publicly called Bill Clinton “a shithead” and constantly praised Reagan as the greatest president in American history. He went on to hate Barack Obama for ending the manned space flight program. He combined a claim to “hate politics” with a deep desire to see the Tea Party win in 2010 since I guess that wasn’t politics or something.

You know Bradbury would have loved Donald Trump.

Of course, I don’t care about an author’s politics. I am unlikely to read much Bradbury because I don’t care for the genre, but just because someone became a monster later in life and reinterpreted his own classics to be an analogy for the scary “homosexual groups” is not going to get in the way of me ignoring the person the author later became and just focusing on the book.

Among those who ignored the old man ranting was Barack Obama. Bradbury died in 2012, at the age of 91. Obama himself released a statement:

“For many Americans, the news of Ray Bradbury’s death immediately brought to mind images from his work, imprinted in our minds, often from a young age. His gift for storytelling reshaped our culture and expanded our world. But Ray also understood that our imaginations could be used as a tool for better understanding, a vehicle for change, and an expression of our most cherished values. There is no doubt that Ray will continue to inspire many more generations with his writing, and our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends.”

Obama wasn’t the perfect president, but he was a man of class, no doubt about that. Bradbury? Not so much a man of class.

Ray Bradbury is buried in Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California.

Bradbury is in the Library of America series, first appearing with Volume 347. If you would like this series to visit other authors in the LOA series, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Elizabeth Spencer, who is Volume 344, is in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. F. Scott Fitzgerald, at Volume 353 and whose early work is finally in the series thanks to its entry in the public domain, is in Rockville, Maryland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.