Ray Bradbury - Career

Career

When the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1934, Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School and was active in the drama club. Bradbury often roller-skated through Hollywood in hopes of meeting celebrities. 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.

In 1936, at a secondhand bookstore in Hollywood, Ray Bradbury discovered a handbill promoting meetings of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. Thrilled to find there were others with his interests, at the age of sixteen Bradbury joined a weekly Thursday-night conclave.

Bradbury began submitting his short stories for publication. After a rejection notice from the pulp magazine Weird Tales, Bradbury submitted to magazines. At Mademoiselle magazine, a young editorial assistant named Truman Capote spotted one of Bradbury's short stories, "Homecoming'". Capote picked the Bradbury manuscript from a slush pile, which led to it getting published in the magazine. Homecoming won a place in The O. Henry Prize Stories of 1947.

Bradbury had just graduated from high school when he met Robert Heinlein, then 31 years old. Bradbury recalled, "He was well known, and he wrote humanistic science fiction, which influenced me to dare to be human instead of mechanical."

His first published story was "Hollerbochen's Dilemma", which appeared in the fanzine Imagination! in January, 1938. In July 1939, Forrest J. Ackerman gave nineteen year old Ray Bradbury the money to head to New York for the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York City, and funded Ray Bradbury's fanzine, titled Futuria Fantasia. Bradbury wrote most of its four issues, each limited to under 100 copies.Between 1940 and 1947, he was a contributor to Rob Wagner's film magazine, Script.

Ray Bradbury was free to start a career in writing when, owing to his bad eyesight, he was rejected admission into the military during World War II. Having been inspired by science fiction heroes like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, Bradbury began to publish science fiction stories in fanzines in 1938. Bradbury was invited by Forrest J. Ackerman to attend the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, which at the time met at Clifton's Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles. This was where he met the writers Robert A. Heinlein, Emil Petaja, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett, and Jack Williamson.

In 1939 Bradbury joined Laraine Day's Wilshire Players Guild where for two years he wrote and acted in several plays. They were, as Bradbury later described, "so incredibly bad" that he gave up playwriting for two decades. 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 by Arkham House, a small press in Sauk City, Wisconsin, owned by writer August Derleth.

A chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore with the British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood gave Bradbury the opportunity to put The Martian Chronicles into the hands of a respected critic. Isherwood's glowing review followed.

Bradbury relates the following meeting with Sergei Bondarchuk, director of soviet 1967 epic film War and Peace, at a Hollywood award ceremony in Bondarchuk's honor: "They formed a long queue and as Bondarchuk was walking along it he recognized several people:

Oh Mr Ford, I like your film.” He recognized the director Gretta Garbo, and someone else. I was standing at the very end of the queue and silently watched this. Bondarchuk shouted to me; “Ray Bradbury, is that you?” He rushed up to me, embraced me, dragged me inside, grabbed a bottle of Stolichnaya, sat down at his table where his closest friends were sitting. All the famous Hollywood directors in the queue were bewildered. They stared at me and asked each other “who is this Bradbury?” And, swearing, they left, leaving me alone with Bondarchuk…

Bradbury was once described as a "Midwest surrealist" and is often labeled a science fiction writer. Bradbury resisted that categorization, however:

First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. It was named so to represent the temperature at which paper ignites. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time — because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.

On another occasion, Bradbury observed that the novel touches on the alienation of people by media:

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap opera cries, sleep walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

Besides his fiction work, Bradbury wrote many short essays on the arts and culture, attracting the attention of critics in this field. 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.

Several comic book writers have adapted Bradbury's stories. Particularly noted among these were EC Comics' line of horror and science-fiction comics, which often featured Bradbury's name on the cover announcing that one story in that issue would be an adaptation of his work. The comics featuring Bradbury's stories included Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Crime Suspenstories, Haunt of Fear and others.

Bradbury remained an enthusiastic playwright all his life, leaving a rich theatrical legacy as well as literary. Bradbury headed the Pandemonium Theatre Company in Los Angeles for many years and had a five-year relationship with the Fremont Centre Theatre in South Pasadena.