Books Written by Ray Bradbury

More than 27 novels and story collections, and about 600 short stories. He wrote eleven novels; eight of them, together with his best-known collections and Zen in the Art of Writing, make up the 13 key books on this page. The rest are listed under “Everything Else”: dozens of story collections, books for young readers and essays.

The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The October Country (1955), Dandelion Wine (1957), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), The Halloween Tree (1972), The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980), Death Is a Lonely Business (1985), Zen in the Art of Writing (1990), From the Dust Returned (2001) and Farewell Summer (2006). His first book was Dark Carnival (1947).

With The Martian Chronicles (1950): linked stories about the settling of Mars that show both the story writer and the novelist. If you would rather start with one short novel, read Fahrenheit 451; for his small-town side, Dandelion Wine.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), about a fireman whose job is to burn books. The New York Public Library ranked it seventh on its list of most borrowed books of all time. It was filmed by François Truffaut in 1966 and by HBO in 2018.

He gave different emphases at different times. In a 1956 radio interview he said he wrote it when he was worried about the way things were going in the country, with book burning in the McCarthy era on his mind. In a 2007 interview with LA Weekly he said readers had misread it, and that it is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature rather than about government censorship. In his 1979 coda he wrote: “There is more than one way to burn a book.”

Three novels set in Green Town, Illinois, his version of his hometown, Waukegan: Dandelion Wine (1957), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and Farewell Summer (2006). Farewell Summer continues Dandelion Wine directly; Something Wicked has different characters. Summer Morning, Summer Night (2007) collects further Green Town stories.

Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966; HBO, 2018), The Illustrated Man (1969, with Rod Steiger), The Martian Chronicles (an NBC miniseries with Rock Hudson, 1979, written by Richard Matheson), Something Wicked This Way Comes (Disney, 1983, from his own screenplay) and The Halloween Tree (Hanna-Barbera, 1993, which won him an Emmy). He also adapted 65 of his stories for The Ray Bradbury Theater (1985–1992).

Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary borrowed its title from Fahrenheit 451 without asking. Bradbury was upset and pressed Moore to change it, without success. Moore phoned him about two weeks before the release to apologise, saying the marketing was already under way. Bradbury said he did not want any money from the film.

He received a Pulitzer Prize special citation in 2007 for his career as an author of science fiction and fantasy, not for a single book. He also received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2000) and the National Medal of Arts (2004).

On 5 June 2012 in Los Angeles, aged 91. Later that year NASA named the landing site of the Curiosity rover on Mars Bradbury Landing.

Fahrenheit 451 was written by the American author Ray Bradbury. It was published by Ballantine Books on 19 October 1953, after Ballantine had encouraged him to expand his shorter story The Fireman into a novel.

Bradbury first wrote it as the 25,000-word novella The Fireman, published in Galaxy Science Fiction in February 1951. He typed that draft in nine days in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library on a rented typewriter that cost ten cents per half hour (about $9.80 in total), then spent another nine days there adding roughly 25,000 words for the 1953 novel.

Bradbury pointed to the Nazi book burnings in Germany, the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria, which upset him as a boy, and Stalin’s purges, when, as he put it, “they burned the authors instead of the books”. A more personal spark was a late-1949 encounter in which a police officer stopped him for walking at night; that became the story The Pedestrian, which grew into The Fireman and then the novel.

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was an American author and screenwriter who wrote science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery and realistic fiction. He is best known for Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951) and for short stories that broke science fiction into mainstream magazines.

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on 22 August 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois.

No. Ray Bradbury died in Los Angeles on 5 June 2012, aged 91. His publisher, HarperCollins, said he “died peacefully” after a lengthy illness; no specific cause of death was made public.

Bradbury was selling stories in his early twenties and wrote full-time from the age of 24, but The Martian Chronicles (1950) is the book that made his reputation. After it, he broke into well-paying general-interest magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, and Fahrenheit 451 followed in 1953.

In this short story, first published in Collier’s on 28 June 1952 and collected in The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), a company called Time Safari takes rich hunters from 2055 back to the age of dinosaurs. A panicked hunter, Eckels, steps off the safe path and crushes a butterfly; when the group returns, spelling has changed and a would-be dictator has won the election. It shows how a tiny change in the past can have enormous consequences, and is often linked with the idea of the “butterfly effect”.

The Pedestrian (1951) follows Leonard Mead, a writer who walks the empty streets of his city one November night in 2053 while everyone else stays indoors watching television. An empty, automated police car arrests him and takes him to a psychiatric centre for “regressive tendencies”. Its themes are conformity, television-fed passivity and technology crowding out human experience, and it was a direct precursor to Fahrenheit 451.

First published as “The World the Children Made” in The Saturday Evening Post on 23 September 1950, and retitled for The Illustrated Man (1951), the story follows the Hadley family in an automated “Happylife Home”. The children, Peter and Wendy, become obsessed with a virtual-reality nursery showing an African veldt full of lions, and when their parents try to switch it off, the children lock them inside. Its themes are technology replacing parenting and the children’s chilling lack of remorse.

A Pleasure to Burn is a collection, first published in 2010, of Bradbury stories that led up to Fahrenheit 451, including the original novella The Fireman. It shows how the novel’s ideas developed across his earlier short fiction.

Bradbury was raised Baptist, but as an adult he resisted religious labels and called himself a “delicatessen religionist” who drew on both Eastern and Western faiths. In a 2010 CNN interview he said, “I’m a Zen Buddhist if I would describe myself,” called Jesus “a remarkable person”, and described his own talent as “a God-given thing”.