Term Papers on Ray Bradbury

Term Paper Title	Ray Bradbury
# of Words	1162
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.65

Ray Bradbury

     Ray Bradbury was a dreamer. Bradbury had a skill at putting his dreams
onto paper, and into books. He dreams dreams of magic and transformation, good
and evil, small-town America and the canals of Mars. His dreams are not only
popular, but durable. His work consists of short stories, which are not hard to
publish, and keep in the public eye. His stories have stayed in print for nearly
three decades.

     Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in a small town of Waukegan,
Illinois. His parents were Leonard Spaulding and Esther Moberg Bradbury. His
mother, Esther Moberg loved films, she gave her son the middle name Douglas
because of Douglas Fairbanks, and she passed her love of films to her son. "My
mother took me to see everything....." Bradbury explains, "I'm a child of motion
pictures." Prophetically, the first film he saw, at the age of three, was the
horror classic "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", staring Lon Chanley. His teenage
Aunt Neva gave the boy his appreciation of fantasy, by reading him the Oz books,
when he was six. When Bradbury was a child he was encouraged to read the classic,
Norse, Roman, and Greek Myths. When he was old enough to choose his own reading
materials, he chose books by Edger Rice Burroughs and the comic book heroes
Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Prince Valiant. When Bradbury was in Waukegan he
developed his interest in acting and Drama. After seeing a magician, known as
Blackstone, he became fascinated with magic also.

     In 1932, his family moved to Tucson Arizona. With his talents he learned
in Waukegan (amateur magician) he got a job at the local radio station. "I was
on the radio every Saturday night reading comic strips to the kiddies and being
paid in free tickets, to the local cinema, where I saw 'The Mummy', 'The Murders
in the Wax Museum', 'Dracula', .....and 'King Kong'." His family only stayed in
Tuscan for a year, but Bradbury feels: "It was one of the greatest years of my
life because I was acting and singing in operettas and writing, my first short
stories."

     In 1934 his family moved to Los Angeles, where Bradbury has remained. He
attended Los Angeles High School, where he wrote and took part in many dramatic
productions. His literary tastes were broadened to include Thomas Wolfe and
Ernest Hemingway when he took a creative writing course. In 1938 Los Angeles
High School yearbook, the following prediction appeared beneath his picture:

Likes to write stories Admired as a thespian Headed for literary distinction

     After graduation Bradbury sold newspapers until he saved up enough money
to buy a typewriter and rent a small office. In the early 1940's his stories
appeared regularly in Weird Tales. "I sold a story every month there for three
or four years when I was (in my early twenties).  Made the magnificent sum of
twenty dollars for each story." Bradbury sold his first stories in 1945 to
"slick" magazines - Collier's, Charm, and Mademoiselle.

     Shortly after his marriage to Marguerite Susan McClure in 1947,
Bradbury's first book, Dark Carnival, was published by Arkham House. About this
time, the idea for an important book about Mars, a collection of loosely
connected stories, came to Bradbury.

     The subjects that engage Bradbury's pen are many: magic, horror, and
monsters; rockets, robots, time and space travel; growing up in the Midwest town
in the 1920's, and growing old in an abandoned Earth colony on another planet.
Despite their themes, his stories contain a sense of wonder, often a sense of
joy, and a lyrical and rhythimic touch that sets his work apart.

     Using an analytical approach to such stories is to do a kind of violence to ...

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