Ray Bradbury

RAY BRADBURY

Say what you will about Hollywood's obsession with youth, but a certain 83 year-old is hotter than ever after over a half century in the spotlight: Ray Bradbury. Three high-profile Tinseltown projects will adapt this icon's masterpieces for today's audience: slated for 2005, the book-burning futuristic saga Fahrenheit 451 will be directed by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile); out later this year, the time-travel adventure The Sound of Thunder stars Edward Burns and Ben Kingsley, directed by Peter Hyams (End of Days, The Relic); Bradbury himself has updated The Illustrated Man for an upcoming SCI FI Channel TV-movie. "I'm very happy that my muse has given me a lot of new ideas to go along with the old ones," Bradbury said in a statement regarding his classic 1951 short story collection about a tattooed man whose body-art tells many tales.

Winning the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000, this living legend could easily have rested on his laurels in the twenty-first century. He's published over thirty books, almost 600 short stories, many poems, essays and plays, and has been awarded the O. Henry Memorial Award, a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from the SFWA, the Benjamin Franklin Award and much more. The latest tribute offers fans something more dynamic than a trophy or medal: The Best of Ray Bradbury compiles graphic-novel interpretations of his stories from such in-demand comic book artists as Dave Gibbons (Watchmen), P. Craig Russell (Sandman), Richard Corben, Mike Mignola and many others.

Even basking in the praise of the generations of writers, artists and filmmakers he's inspired, Bradbury continues to publish his own novels and short fiction. As he noted on his website, "the act of writing is, for me, like a fever -- something I must do. And it seems I always have some new fever developing, some new love to follow and bring to life."

Born in Waukegan, Illinois in 1920, Bradbury never acquired an education beyond a high school diploma. After several lean years as a paperboy in Los Angeles, he became a full-time writer in 1943, contributing his short stories to various periodicals before publishing them in his first collection, Dark Carnival, in 1947. Toward the end of that decade, he became inspired by the space race and the new horizons it promised, while remaining skeptical of human nature. In several short stories he used the futuristic scenario of space exploration to attack the immediate issues of the Cold-War era: anti-Communist hysteria, racism, censorship in schools, imperialistic foreign policy, and the escalating nuclear arms race.

This soon led to his fix-up novel, The Martian Chronicles, which records the evolving story of the human colonization of Mars. With this groundbreaking work of socially conscious SF, Bradbury joined a very exclusive circle of science fiction writers (including Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein) recognized by critics as having real literary merit. From there, Bradbury went on to publish The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, The October Country, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes and many, many more.

Hollywood isn't exactly new to Bradbury. Many of his works have been filmed, and he adapted sixty-five of his stories for the TV show Ray Bradbury Theater. He was nominated for an Academy Award (for his animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright) and won an Emmy (for his teleplay The Halloween Tree ).