Biography Essay

Although Ray Bradbury remains perhaps the best known of all science-fiction writers, and although his stories and themes have permeated all areas of American culture as have those of no other science-fiction writer—through more than five hundred stories, poems, essays, plays, films, television plays, radio, music, and even comic books-Bradbury is still something of an anomaly in the genre. In a field that thrives on the fantastic and the marvelous, Bradbury's best stories celebrate the mundane; in a field preoccupied with the future, Bradbury's vision is firmly rooted in the past-both his past and the past of America. In a popular genre where reputations, until recently, have been made through ingenious plotting and the exposition of scientific and technological ideas, Bradbury built an enormous reputation virtually on style alone—and then, when the rest of the writers in the genre began to discover...