Authors Like Ray Bradbury

Edgar Allan Poe

American · “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842)

Poe (1809–1849) was born in Boston, raised in Richmond, Virginia, and died in Baltimore at forty. His tales of premature burial, guilt and decaying houses helped invent the modern horror story and the detective story. Bradbury imitated him until about the age of eighteen, and in “Usher II”, a chapter of The Martian Chronicles, a man rebuilds Poe’s House of Usher on Mars to take revenge on the censors who burned books like Poe’s.

Every book by Edgar Allan Poe →

H. G. Wells

British · The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898)

Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a shopkeeper in Bromley, Kent, trained as a science teacher and wrote his first ‘scientific romances’ in the 1890s. The War of the Worlds brings Martian invaders to the Home Counties; The Time Machine imagines a far future in which humanity has split into two species. Readers should know that his early non-fiction, such as Anticipations (1901), supports eugenics.

Aldous Huxley

British · Brave New World (1932), The Doors of Perception (1954), Island (1962)

Huxley (1894–1963) was born in Surrey into a family of scientists and moved to California in 1937. Brave New World imagines a World State where people are bred in hatcheries, conditioned in childhood and kept content with the drug soma and endless entertainment. He died in Los Angeles on 22 November 1963, the day President Kennedy was shot.

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George Orwell

British · Animal Farm (1945), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair (1903–1950), who was born in India, educated at Eton and fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Nineteen Eighty-Four, written on the Scottish island of Jura while he was ill with tuberculosis, follows Winston Smith, a clerk who rewrites history for the Ministry of Truth.

Every book by George Orwell →

Shirley Jackson

American · “The Lottery” (1948), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Jackson (1916–1965) lived most of her adult life in North Bennington, Vermont. “The Lottery”, published in The New Yorker in June 1948, about a village that gathers every summer for a deadly ritual, brought the magazine more mail than any piece of fiction it had published. The Haunting of Hill House leaves open whether the house is haunted or the woman inside it is coming apart.

Kurt Vonnegut

American · Player Piano (1952), Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Vonnegut (1922–2007) was born in Indianapolis and, as an American prisoner of war, survived the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 in an underground meat locker. Player Piano imagines an America where machines have taken almost all the work; Slaughterhouse-Five sends Billy Pilgrim back and forth in time between Dresden and an alien zoo.

Ursula K. Le Guin

American · The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973), The Dispossessed (1974)

Le Guin (1929–2018) was born in Berkeley, California, the daughter of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. The Left Hand of Darkness, in which an envoy visits a planet whose people have no fixed sex, won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” a perfect city’s happiness depends on one suffering child.

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Stephen King

American · ’Salem’s Lot (1975), Different Seasons (1982), It (1986)

King was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947 and has published more than sixty novels since Carrie (1974). It follows a group of children in the town of Derry who face a shape-shifting creature, often in the form of a clown, and return as adults to face it again. “The Body”, in Different Seasons, follows four boys on a walk to see a dead body one summer, and was filmed as Stand by Me (1986).

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Margaret Atwood

Canadian · The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), The Testaments (2019)

Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939 and is a poet, novelist and critic. The Handmaid’s Tale, set in the Republic of Gilead, where fertile women are forced to bear children for the ruling class and forbidden to read, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; its sequel, The Testaments, shared the prize in 2019. She has said she put nothing in Gilead that had not already happened somewhere.

Every book by Margaret Atwood →

Kazuo Ishiguro

British, born in Japan · The Remains of the Day (1989), Never Let Me Go (2005), Klara and the Sun (2021)

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England with his family in 1960. Never Let Me Go is narrated by Kathy H., who looks back on her childhood at Hailsham, an English boarding school whose pupils slowly learn what they were raised for. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017; Klara and the Sun is narrated by a robot companion.

Every book by Kazuo Ishiguro →