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Overview
Becoming Ray Bradbury chronicles the making of an iconic American writer by exploring Ray Bradbury's childhood and early years of his long life in fiction, film, television, radio, and theater. Jonathan R. Eller measures the impact of the authors, artists, illustrators, and filmmakers who stimulated Bradbury's imagination throughout his first three decades. Unprecedented access to Bradbury's personal papers and other private collections provides insight into his emerging talent through his unpublished correspondence, his rare but often insightful notes on writing, and his interactions with those who mentored him during those early years.
Beginning with his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, and Los Angeles, this biography follows Bradbury's development from avid reader to maturing author, making a living writing for pulp magazines. Eller illuminates the sources of Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind, the human condition, and the ambiguities of life and death--themes that became increasingly apparent in his early fiction. Bradbury's correspondence documents his frustrating encounters with the major trade publishing houses and his earliest unpublished reflections on the nature of authorship. Eller traces the sources of Bradbury's very conscious decisions, following the sudden success of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, to voice controversial political statements in his fiction, and he highlights the private motivations behind the burst of creative energy that transformed his novella "The Fireman" into the classic novel Fahrenheit 451.
Becoming Ray Bradbury reveals Bradbury's emotional world as it matured through his explorations of cinema and art, his interactions with agents and editors, his reading discoveries, and the invaluable reading suggestions of older writers. These largely unexplored elements of his life pave the way to a deeper understanding of his more public achievements, providing a biography of the mind, the story of Bradbury's self-education and the emerging sense of authorship at the heart of his boundless creativity.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Eller shows how Bradbury found his vocation in a private world of mimeographed fanzines and couch-surfing, of transcontinental trips to the very first SF conventions, of the intense rivalries and controversies of a small enclosed world. . . . Eller’s excellent account makes clear that one of the reasons why Bradbury came to seem an important new voice is that he was never as naive a writer as literary patrons such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley may have assumed.”Times Literary Supplement
"Every page is packed with fascinating material about one of this country’s most beloved writers."--The Washington Post, Michael Dirda
"A very Bradburyian biography."--SFRA Review
"In great and always fascinating detail, Eller chronicles the journey Bradbury took from his youth to his early middle years. . . . [A] fine and important book."--Neworld Review
"Eller's work is thorough and enlightening on the subject of one of science fiction's greatest minds. Highly recommended not just for Bradbury fans but for all students of science fiction."--Library Journal
"A treasury of otherwise unavailable information. . . . Fans of Bradbury will find this book a fascinating and revealing look into his life and work."--Science Fiction Studies
"Jonathan R. Eller traces a wide variety of influences on Ray Bradbury's work, offering a detailed literary and cultural genealogy. Utterly compelling, this book contains a substantial amount of new material that will be invaluable for future scholars of Bradbury's work."--Gary K. Wolfe, author of Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature
Michael Dirda
Every page is packed with fascinating material about one of this country's most beloved writers…If you're a Bradbury fan…you'll want to read it…Eller's book is grounded in biography, but it seeks especially to illuminate Bradbury's intellectual and artistic evolution, focusing on the books he read and the teachers, agents and editors with whom he worked.—The Washington Post
Library Journal
Eller (cofounder, Ctr. for Ray Bradbury Studies, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ.; coauthor, Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction) provides a detailed account of the experiences that shaped Ray Bradbury's life and writing career from his childhood until he embarked on the screenplay for John Huston's Moby Dick in late 1953. Eller narrates biographical information pulled from primary and secondary sources and presents it in concise, informative chapters, giving much attention to the writers, editors, and artists with whom Bradbury interacted at the time, e.g., illustrator Hannes Bok and authors Edmond Hamilton and Henry Kuttner, and showcasing their involvement in Bradbury's intellectual growth. Eller clearly analyzes many of the influences on Bradbury—such as his reading of Karen Horney's The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) and a 1945 trip to Mexico—and discusses the relationship between Bradbury's life and his writings, perhaps most notably the writer's meeting with Doubleday editor Walter I. Bradbury (no relation) in 1949, which prompted the concept of The Martian Chronicles. VERDICT Eller's work is thorough and enlightening on the subject of one of science fiction's greatest minds. Highly recommended not just for Bradbury fans but for all students of science fiction.—Jennifer Harris, Mercyhurst Coll. Lib., Erie, PAThe Barnes & Noble Review
These days, when it's common to see adults engrossed in Harry Potter on the subway, and the edgiest shows on HBO are about vampires and dragons, it's hard to believe there was once a time when sci-fi and fantasy fiction were confined to a cultural ghetto. But in his Becoming Ray Bradbury, Jonathan R. Eller shows that being a sci-fi writer in pre–World War II America was thoroughly unglamorous—less a career than a dubious kind of hobby. Ray Bradbury himself was an undistinguished high school senior when he joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction League in 1937, and in the years that followed he seemed likely to remain in that amateur realm: sending his stories to mimeographed fanzines, scraping together bus fare to attend annual conventions. The highest glory available was to publish in "prozines" with names like Astonishing Stories and Thrilling Wonder, which actually paid their contributors—sometimes as much as a penny a word.
As Eller shows, Bradbury cherished a secret sense that he was marked out for something greater. "I believe there was always one core of belief in me that burned from the time I was twelve on: I want to be different, to be different from everybody else? It is only that hard core of wanting to be different that separates the true artist, I believe, from the man who writes merely as a means of livelihood." Eller's book is an academic study, charting Bradbury's early career in thorough, at times numbing detail, up to the publication of the three books that made him famous: The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451, which appeared in rapid sequence in the early 1950s.
But it is easy to imagine a novelist turning the young Bradbury into a character like Jude Fawley, in Hardy's Jude the Obscure: a gifted man, cut off by poverty and provincialism from the sources of high culture, struggling to make his way into the literary world where he belongs. What allowed Bradbury to succeed where Jude failed was partly luck; for one thing, his bad eyesight spared him from the draft, allowing him to spend the World War II years practicing his craft.
Above all, it was sci-fi itself that functioned as Bradbury's means of self-education. From the pulps and "weirds, " he found his way to middlebrow writers like Somerset Maugham—"a man of straight common sense, " in Bradbury's admiring words, whose work taught him, "don't listen to your friends, don't be political, don't be psychological, be yourself." In fact, it was exactly their political and psychological themes that made Bradbury's sci-fi stories appeal to readers like Christopher Isherwood, an early champion of his work. In The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury imagines the human settlement of Mars as a replay of European colonialism, complete with the extermination of the natives; Fahrenheit 451, with its vision of a future where all books are burned, was inspired by Arthur Koestler's anti-Communist classic Darkness at Noon.
Still, Bradbury remained painfully sensitive to condescension from highbrows. At a party in New York in 1951, he was excited to meet some of Balanchine's dancers, until "[s]omeone said, 'You're writing what? This Buck Rogers–Flash Gordon stuff. You're a science fiction writer.' Well, you know, it was embarrassing and I tried to keep my temper and be good-humored with them but they wouldn't have that; they just kept moving in on me. It was this kind of snobbism you see that I've had to put up with a good part of my life." It must be a sweet vindication for Bradbury, in his ninety-second year as this is written, to see how completely sci-fi has conquered its doubters.
Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Nextbook.org. Reviewer: Adam Kirsch