This is a very revealing portrait of Ray Bradbury as well as being an intimate look at his writing discipline that made him such a prolific author. I was particularly intrigued by glimpses into his personal life and his determination to become known as a writer of poetic literature instead of solely science fiction and fantasy.

If you ever enjoyed a Ray Bradbury book or short story growing up, and you want to know more about his writing and personal life, this book is a page turner.

Not one to beat around the bush, Weller begins gushing in his first sentence: "Like many in my generation, I am a lifelong, card-carrying member of the Intergalactic, Time-traveling, Paleontology, Mummies, Martians, Jack-o'-Lanterns, Carnivals, and Foghorn-coveting Ray Bradbury fan club." Thankfully, matters improve from there. RB's early days as a poor, struggling writer are fascinating. With no money for a telephone, he gave out the number of the gas station pay phone across the street, pretending it was his, and left his window open so he could hear it ring. Weller is strong on detail but light on analysis, although it may be telling that he devotes 60 pages to the last 40 years, and 270 to the first 40. Indispensable for foghorn-coveters.

A wonderful in-depth look at one of my favorite authors. To look behind the pages and understand Bradbury's strategies and thought processes was a delight. Weller did a great job of letting me see how and why Bradbury wrote certain things and what motivated him when things were tough. There were tears and cheers, surprises and confirmations along the way. I will reread this book, I'm sure, as a revisitation with a man who inspires me. Thank you, Mr. Weller.

He was a very jolly, loud, enthusiastic guy, people liked him but they thought he was a bit naïve and a lot sentimental. He would cry at the drop of a hat. One person said about him at age 17

Ray was a rather boisterous young boy. He liked to imitate Hitler and WC Fields. It’s a wonder we didn’t strangle him.

Like Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan, Ray Bradbury had a golden decade of high productivity – everything he got famous for was written at speed between 1947 and 1957, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles.

A LOVE HATE THING

He had a very conflicted relationship with science fiction. He loved the wonder but didn’t care a hoot about the science. Damon Knight said that though Ray Bradbury

has a large following among science fiction readers, there is at least an equally large contingent of people who cannot stomach his work at all, they say he has no respect for the medium…that – worst crime of all – he fears and distrusts science.

He was in fact a technophobe – never learned how to drive, didn’t fly on a plane until age 62, owned a computer but didn’t use it. In the 50s wrote for television but didn’t own a set.

Author Sam Weller of the unlikely Dickensian name says

Ray’s Mars was beautifully impossible. His planet had an atmosphere and it had blue hills. For the author, science was not the point… it was the metaphor that mattered.

To sf purists he was an often-resented outsider and of course to purveyors of literature he was a lowly sf writer who should quickly be shown the door. When the beautiful fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles was published Ray wrote to his publisher

I think we could have gotten more reviews from the big people on Chronicles if it hadn’t been for that science-fiction label… Can’t we do something about this, please, Brad? Must the light remain under the bushel-basket?

FAMOUS FRIENDS

His stuff was so good that hoity-toity intellectual types who wrote proper literary books noticed it and he got a good review from none other than Christopher Isherwood who invited him round to tea. Some time later at chez Isherwood who should turn up but Aldous Huxley. They offered our Ray some mind-expanding mescaline. They wonderd what effect it would have on the Bradbury brain. He declined and said :

I don’t want to have a lot of perceptions. I want to have one at a time. When I write a short story, I open the trapdoor on the top of my head, take out one lizard, shut the trapdoor, skin the lizard, and pin it up on the wall.

Ray was afraid that if he took mescaline, he would be unable to, as he put it, “ shut the trapdoor and all my lizards would escape”.

As he got more famous (without having any massive blockbusters – but quite quickly stories and novels started popping up in syllabuses) famous people would be encountered quite regularly. Typical evening for Ray Bradbury : I went to the theatre and John Huston was there with his girlfriend Olivia de Havilland.

SPEAKING OF JOHN HUSTON

The tall booming Hemingwayesque director was his favourite and he longed to scriptwrite for him and lo! It came to pass in a highly be-careful-what-you-wish-for way. Mr Huston decided one fine day “Ray Bradbury will write a script for my film of Moby Dick!” And Ray found himself on a boat to Ireland (at this point he refused to fly).

The reason Ray had been summoned to Ireland to work on a screenplay for a film that was to be shot largely in the Canary Islands was so Huston could make the foxhunting season.

John Huston loved to roam the world shootin huntin fishin drinkin and womanizin and directin. He fancied murdering some Irish foxes and they did it in a very wild way, apparently, so Dublin it was for Ray, where he spent months of misery as the butt of Huston’s malicious unpleasant humiliating humour (think Joe Pesci in Goodfellas if Joe Pesci was over 6 feet high and a big shot film director).

BRAND NAME RECOGNITION

Sam Weller says

Short stories. Novels. Radio. Comic books. Movies. Television. The stage. Architecture and design. Arguably, no other twentieth-century literary figure can claim such sweeping cultural impact.

What he is saying is that After writing his handful of famous books (there is a larger armful of non-famous books because he never stopped) Ray Bradbury turned himself into a brand, and affixed his name to all manner of cultural enterprises involving world fairs, Disney, tall buildings, Apollo missions and whatnot. And all without going to college or university. His only college was the local library.

It’s a rather large claim. If it’s true it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

I read this because RB was my first beloved author and I think I still love (some) of his stuff, and I realised I knew absolutely nothing about him. And I’m glad I found out. It’s not especially dramatic as life-stories go, but it left me with a warm glow.

Excellent biography of one of America's greatest writers! Ray Bradbury has had a profound influence on American culture through his books,films,radio shows and poetry. You could say he helped inspire the Space Age in America.

This is a wonderful book to provide an understanding of who was Ray Brandbury. It is a rags to riches story of a truly creative individual proving the truth that persistence will out, if one is persistent enough, he/she will achieve success in the end. If the reader wishes to understand Brandbury's life and work this book is a must read.

I love Ray Bradbury and his work. And this was an interesting look into the events that helped shape him and his writing. But the book becomes really dull about halfway through, but that is not because of Sam or Ray himself. But because being a writer isn't an action-filled adventure. Most of the time a writers life is just writing and churning out stories. And in Rays case it's also about how he met with certain people, how his career went etc.

So this is not a "rise-and-fall-and-rise" of the great Ray Bradbury. Because his career has always been a steady rise.
But I enjoyed it!

Sam Weller opens his bio on Ray Bradbury by admitting he is a Bradbury fan boy. But that doesn't deter how good this look at the fantasy/sci-fi writer is. Weller presents a fair, balanced look at the author of a different type of literary genre. Is it fantasy? Is it sci-fi? Is it fictionalized childhood memories with a dash of drama? Weller takes on the journey of how Bradbury got to be Bradbury.

I was especially interested in his early days in Waukegan, Ill. I met my wife to be near Waukegan in 2015 and took many, many trips up there to see her. One of my favorite places in the country is the harbor park in Waukegan and Sheridan Road that travels along the shore of Lake Michigan. We've seen Bradbury's named park, the Genesee Theater and the library there.

Weller writes of influences on Bradbury... walking home through the ditch near the shore and being frightened when his brother ran off and left him, the lakeshore carnival and an encounter with Mr. Electrico, a stained glass window in his home. Weller is great with those details and writes a very compelling look at Bradbury's life.

Later, he chronicles the author's move to Los Angeles and his slow rise in fame. Bradbury, if not anything else, was confident and boasted how good he would become. Most of his boasts did come true. He wrote constantly, supported by his wife. He was so poor at times that he couldn't afford a telephone and gave out the number of a phone booth at a neighboring gas station to his home. He'd leave his office window open and run out to answer the phone when he heard it.

There are downsides to Bradbury and Weller does point that out. He was egotistical near the end of his career. He often thought others were stealing his work. He was especially accusatory of Rod Serling for "taking" some of his ideas and using them for "The Twilight Zone."

Weller also notes discrepancies in Bradbury's recall of things. He mentioned fleeing from his family's car on the return trip from the funeral of a relative on Labor Day to see the carnival. Weller found that the relative who died actually had his funeral in October, some three weeks later.

Weller doesn't shy way from other indiscretions. He notes two of Bradbury's affairs late in his marriage and writes of how Bradbury's wife asked for divorces twice (not as a result of those affairs, but because she said she no longer loved him). Bradbury's wife, when asked by Weller for the book, said she did not recall wishing for a divorce at any time. Was that Bradbury's made-up excuse for his own affairs, because Weller portrayed Maggie Bradbury as a super supportive wife during Bradbury's writing career.

All of that and much more is in Weller's book. There's the evolution of how his classic Fahrenheit 451 came to be, story origins, discussions with editors and publishers, his scriptwriting days and much more. This is quite the fascinating biography for anyone who is either a fan of Bradbury or, like me, doesn't know much of him.

Really got to know Ray Bradbury

Excellent book read. All facets of Bradbury, good and not so good, shared in this incredible book about his life, his hunger for attention, his ability to write and capture the appreciation of millions of readers across the world.

Ray Bradbury lived such an interesting life and wrote so many great things. I found this biography on one of my favorite authors both accurate in contrast to other things that I've read and watched on Bradbury's life, and incredibly interesting and captivating. He lived such a full life. I'm sad that he's gone, but I'm glad that he experienced all these great things and really lived.

So, so lovely. I learned so much about Ray Bradbury, the man, as well as his long and illustrious career. As a fan more of his non-fiction, I am now curious about his classics, and will likely enjoy them better now that I understand the man who wrote them.

Highly, highly recommended. A rare 5 stars from me. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️