Ray Bradbury

With the upcoming viewing of our next film, Something Wicked This Way Comes, it seemed appropriate to research a bit upon Ray Bradbury. He was a very well-known author, with his greatest known work being Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury had written 27 novels and over 600 short stories in his lifetime, each published into about 36 languages around the world. He had written in many genres, from fantasy to science fiction, from mystery to horror. Millions of these copies have been sold worldwide and critically acclaimed to have attracted a massive audience.
In his early life, Bradbury had written his first story at the age of elven, during the time of the Great Depression. His greatest and earliest influences were Edgar Allen Poe and Edgar Rice Burrows. Thus, a year later at the age of twelve, he imitated Poe's writing of horror stories until the age of eighteen.  He spent most of his time at the library in Waukegan, where he read many authors including Burrows' Tarzan of the Apes. He was so enthralled with this book that he eventually wrote his own sequel to it at the same age of twelve. At twenty years old, he stopped reading genre books and moved into authors such as Alexander Pope and John Donne. In high school, he joined the Poetry and Drama clubs, with plans to be an actor, but as the years went on, he became more serious with his writing. Bradbury never went to college though, claiming that libraries were what raised him to know literature, and during the times of the Depression, he had no money, so he didn't believe in colleges or universities. It thus came to that he worked in the libraries for three days a week, for ten years.
With such an aspiring past, and no post-high school education, Bradbury's rise to becoming one of modern history's most successful authors was truly achieved through inspiration and hard working natural talent.