The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (P.S.) - Softcover

Weller, Sam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060545844 ISBN 13: 9780060545840

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2006

Synopsis

Accomplished journalist Sam Weller met the Ray Bradbury while writing a cover story for the Chicago Tribune Magazine and spent hundreds of hours interviewing Bradbury, his editors, family members, and longtime friends. With unprecedented access to private archives, he uncovered never–before–published letters, documents, and photographs that help tell the story of this literary genius and his remarkable creative journey. The result is a richly textured, detailed biography that illuminates the origins and accomplishments of Bradbury's fascinating mind.

About this title

About the Author

Sam Weller is the authorized biographer of Ray Bradbury and a two-time Bram Stoker Award finalist. He is the author of The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (William Morrow, 2005), and Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews (Melville House Publishers/Stop Smiling Books, 2010). Weller has written for the Paris Review, National Public Radio, and is the former Midwest Correspondent for Publishers Weekly. His short fiction has been published in numerous journals and magazines.

Mort Castle is a horror author and a writing teacher who has published over 500 short stories. Twice a winner of the Black Quill award, seven times a Bram Stoker Award nominee, Castle edited On Writing Horror, the primary reference work for dark fiction authors. He lives near Chicago with Jane, his wife of 40 years.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The title of Weller's biography, the first of the great and influential storyteller Ray Bradbury, is a play on one of Bradbury's most loved books, The Martian Chronicles (1950), and a perfect description of Weller's approach. According to Webster's, chronicle means a "continuous historical account of events arranged in order of time without analysis or interpretation." Although Weller discusses Bradbury's enthusiasms (comics, movies, Halloween, and ice cream) and key themes (loneliness, mortality, magic, censorship, racism, war, and technology), offers frank observations about his personality ("a poster boy for the Peter Pan syndrome"), and describes how Bradbury transformed his past into "autobiographical fantasies," his primary objective is to tell straight the entire, amazing story of how a myopic boy from Waukegan, Illinois, turned himself into the mind-expanding, genre-transcending, and internationally beloved creator of such seminal tales as The Illustrated Man (1951) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Bradbury granted literary journalist and lifelong fan Weller unprecedented access to his private life and private archive, and Weller has repaid the favor with a compulsively readable account of an exceptionally prescient, innovative, eccentric, and dedicated writer who has electrified the imaginations of generations of readers. More scholarly and literary biographies will follow, but none will have the vitality and intimacy of this living portrait. Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0060545844
• ISBN 13: 9780060545840
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384