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Ray Bradbury
b. 1920
Raymond Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, the first child of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, an electrical lineman whose family tree included an ancestor hanged as a witch during the Salem witch trials, and Esther Moberg Bradbury. Bradbury lived a happy childhood soaking up the sights and atmosphere of his rural midwestern town. His love of fantasy began with a viewing of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney in 1923 and was reinforced by his discovery of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories in 1929. His interest in writing was stimulated by family members reading the works of L. Frank Baum and Edgar Allan Poe to him, and later by his acquaintance with the work of Thomas Wolfe.
In 1934 Bradbury moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he was introduced to science fiction fandom through new friends Leigh Brackett and Henry Kuttner. Upon graduating from high school he supported himself selling newspapers and wrote prodigiously. His first professional fiction sale, a collaboration with Henry Hasse entitled "Pendulum," appeared in Super Science Stories in 1941. Shortly thereafter Bradbury became a regular contributor to Weird Tales, where his evocative tales of the dark side of small-town life were hailed as a turning point in weird fiction, hitherto dominated by excesses of the Gothic style. The best of these stories were collected in his first book, Dark Carnival (1947), the contents of which were modified and reprinted as The October Country (1955). In 1947 he married Marguerite McClure, with whom he would have four children.
In the late 1940s Bradbury began sending to Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and other pulp science fiction magazines interplanetary adventures more concerned with human conflict than the scientific extrapolation by which the genre was defined. In 1950 he assembled many of these stories into The Martian Chronicles, an episodic first novel about mankind's colonization of Mars that helped to bring science fiction to the attention of the literary mainstream. Although Bradbury's collections The Illustrated Man (1951) and The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953) and his dystopic novel

 
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