Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, to Esther and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury. He was surrounded by extended family during his childhood in Waukegan. This period would be the foundation for later stories; in his writings, Waukegan becomes "Green Town" Illinois.

The Bradbury family moved several times as their father sought employment. After two short stints in Tuscon, Arizona, after which they always returned to Waukegan, the family settled in Los Angeles, California when Bradbury was 14 years old. Bradbury, who was in love with Hollywood, was ecstatic.

Throughout his youth, Bradbury was an avid reader and writer. He knew at a young age that he was going into one of the arts. At the age of eleven, he began writing his own stories, sometimes writing on butcher paper, as it was the only paper available.

He spent much of his time in libraries, reading authors such as H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe, and later extending his reading to anything of literary value he could get his hands on. He loved libraries so much, in fact, that after graduating from Los Angeles High School he couldn't afford to go to college and instead spent three days a week at the local library. Bradbury wrote his famous novel Fahrenheit 451 in UCLA's Powell Library, at a rented typewriter. 

Bradbury married the only girl he ever dated, Marguerite McClure, at the age of twenty-seven, and was married to her for fifty-six years, until her death in 2003. Together they had four daughters.

In 1999 Bradbury suffered a stroke that left him partially dependent on a wheelchair for mobility. Despite this, Bradbury continued to write voraciously until his death in 2012, at the age of 91. He is best known for writing science fiction, though he claimed what he wrote was not science fiction but fantasy. Some of his most famous books include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes.