Ex Libris: Ray Bradbury

Writer Ray Bradbury delivers a lecture at the 12th Annual LA Times Festival of Books at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus on April 28, 2007 in Los Angeles, Calif. Charley Gallay/Getty Images

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) wrote about dinosaurs, time machines, and Halloween. The man who never learned to drive a car published story after story about space travel. Through his words and talent, he could bring alive a sleepy Midwestern town, a raucous Irish pub, a Martian sunset, or a cotton candy carnival, all without seeming to break a sweat. He co-wrote the screenplay of “Moby Dick” with John Huston and helped design part of the Epcot Center.

Bradbury also wrote about books and writers. No—he did more than merely write about them, he celebrated them; he shouted their names from the rooftops. He’d fallen in love with a platoon of writers and wanted us to do the same.

In a brief essay about his most famous work, “Fahrenheit 451,” Bradbury wrote, “Since writing this book, I have spun more stories, novels, essays, and poems about writers than any other writer in history that I can think of.” This is no empty boast. In his verse and short stories he sang the praises of writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Oscar Wilde, and many more.

Ray Bradbury (1959) was heavily influenced by many great writers. Public Domain

To discuss the books that influenced Bradbury would require a tome rather than a short essay. Bearing that in mind, here are just a few of his guides and mentors.

Aunt Neva and Uncle Bion

According to biographer Sam Weller, Bradbury’s Aunt Neva, who was just 10 years older, inspired the boy’s imagination and interest in literature more than any other person. For Christmas 1925, Neva gave her nephew “Once Upon a Time,” a collection of beautifully illustrated classic fairy tales. Decades later, Bradbury was still under the spell of that book: “When I go to a bookstore, I rush right to the children’s section because of the illustrations.”

Neva later introduced him to Frank Baum’s “Oz” series. Filled with fantastical events and dreams, these books, along with others owned by Neva like “Alice in Wonderland,” had a lifelong impact on this master of fantasy. Neva, he later wrote, had sparked what he called his “Journey to Far Metaphor.”

Weller points us toward another influential relative Uncle Bion Bradbury, an enormous fan and collector of the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. His stories about “Tarzan of the Apes” and “John Carter of Mars” proved lynchpins in Bradbury’s imaginative development. Later he would write his own saga of the Red Planet, “The Martian Chronicles.”

Libraries

In elementary school, Ray and his brother Skip made a weekly ritual of visiting Waukegan’s Carnegie Library every Monday evening. Here began his lifelong love affair with libraries. Later, he would say, “I plunged in and I drowned. When I visited the library, suddenly, the outside world didn’t exist. I found a lot of books and I would sit down at a table and drown in them.”

Built in 1903, the Waukegan Carnegie Library where Ray Bradbury spent many days reading and learning. Public Domain

After deciding not to attend college, and living in Los Angeles, Bradbury made the public library his university campus. “When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.”

Libraries pop up throughout his work. In his novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” for instance, Charles Halloway, a pivotal character in the story, works as a janitor in the local library. In Bradbury’s short story “Exchange,” a young man in uniform revisits the library of his adolescence looking for “old pals.” Soon recognizing the man as the boy she had once known, the librarian goes to the stacks and brings out some ink-and-paper friends: “Tarzan of the Apes,” “John Carter, Warlord of Mars,” “Ivanhoe,” “Robin Hood,” and others.

“Without libraries, what have we?” Bradbury once asked. “We have no past and no future.”

Homage to Books

And, it was in a library that Bradbury wrote his most renowned book. As Weller tells us, he was in the UCLA library hoping to write a novel when he found a typing room in the basement. There were rows of typewriters, each one for rent for 10 cents per half an hour. He later recalled the following nine days as a glorious adventure, “attacking that rentable machine, shoving dimes, pounding away like a crazed chimp.”

The result of this grand word-romp, “Fahrenheit 451,” tells the story of futuristic fireman Guy Montag, whose job is not to put out fires but to burn books. While rightly considered a dystopian classic—it remains standard reading in many schools today—"Fahrenheit 451” is also a song, a profound hymn to the power and beauty of books.

“Farenheit 451” is likely Bradbury’s most famous novel and has been made into a film in 1966 and 2018.

In 2000, the National Book Foundation awarded Ray Bradbury the prestigious Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In his acceptance speech, Bradbury said, “Who you’re honoring tonight is not only myself but the ghost of a lot of your favorite writers. And I wouldn’t be here except that they spoke to me in the library. The library’s been the center of my life.”

Those ghosts can speak to all of us, Bradbury would doubtless agree, if only we open and read their books.

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