R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles

[Pearl@32]

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian ChroniclesRay Bradbury — author of The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and many more literary classics — died this morning in Los Angeles, at the age of 91.

We've got confirmation from the family as well as his biographer, Sam Weller.

His grandson, Danny Karapetian, shared these words with io9 about his grandfather's passing: "If I had to make any statement, it would be how much I love and miss him, and I look forward to hearing everyone's memories about him. He influenced so many artists, writers, teachers, scientists, and it's always really touching and comforting to hear their stories. Your stories. His legacy lives on in his monumental body of books, film, television and theater, but more importantly, in the minds and hearts of anyone who read him, because to read him was to know him. He was the biggest kid I know."

Karapetian added:

    If you're looking for any single passage to remember him by, I just picked up my copy of The Illustrated Man, my favorite of his books. The introduction is entitled "Dancing, So As Not to Be Dead," and there are some great lines about death. My favorite:

    "My tunes and numb3rs are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M.

    So as not to be dead."

    I'm an actor, something he was always been really proud of, and told me once, after getting cast in a play. "You're living out my life! You're doing everything I wanted to do but couldn't!" He was such a driving force in my life, but what always fascinated me were his impact on others. How his stories lifted people up and saved them from lonely summers. Who among us was never buried deep in a Bradbury story, lost in his meticulously yet effortlessly crafted metaphor?

Please feel free to share your thoughts about Bradbury in the comments below. He truly was an inspiration, and the genre is poorer for his passing.

http://io9.com/5916175/rip-ray-bradbury-author-of-fahrenheit-451-and-the-martian-chronicles

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comment from Kip:

Somewhere in America, a boy tap-dances a on a tuned segment of discarded wooden sidewalk, calling his friends to run over the hills by moonlight...

Out on the Veldt, the animals pause for a moment, as though something unseen had passed through their midst...

Somewhere on Mars, a new silver fire is burning to welcome him...

By the river, a Book stops it's recitation for the day, to remember a fine man who wrote such fine, fine things.

Thanks be, for Ray Bradbury, who taught me that there could be poetry in prose.

[Spooky]

 

I loved his books growing up. Had to read 451 in Jr. HS and was hooked after that. Haven't read him in a while.

This one is for you, Ray.

Chuck Me, Ray Bradbury - Rachel Bloom

[AdmiralDigby]

 

[Pearl@32]

In regard to his education, Bradbury said:

    Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Once described as a "Midwest surrealist," he is generally 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.

Bradbury never obtained a driver's license.

Bradbury chose a burial place at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles with a headstone that reads "Author of Fahrenheit 451."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury

I did not read enough Bradbury. I think I read Farenheit 451 and Dandelion Wine. But the only thing I really remember digging was "The Veldt."