Writer Ray Bradbury passed away on Tuesday, June 5 at the age of 91. When I was a high school teacher for seven years, I taught Bradbury's classic "Fahrenheit 451" every year during my tenure. My beaten-down, marked up copy is a thing of beauty. Bradbury, always looking ahead to the future, would have loved it compared to the technology-obsessed world that we're living in now (including the use of e-books).
From the Times:
Mr. Bradbury was hardly the first writer to represent science and technology as a mixed bag of blessings and abominations. The advent of the atomic bomb in 1945 left many Americans deeply ambivalent toward science. The same “super science” that had ended World War II now appeared to threaten the very existence of civilization. Science fiction writers, who were accustomed to thinking about the role of science in society, had trenchant things to say about the nuclear threat.
But the audience for science fiction, published mostly in pulp magazines, was small and insignificant. Mr. Bradbury looked to a larger audience: the readers of mass-circulation magazines like Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post. These readers had no patience for the technical jargon of the science fiction pulps. So he eliminated the jargon; he packaged his troubling speculations about the future in an appealing blend of cozy colloquialisms and poetic metaphors.
Though his books became a staple of high school and college English courses, Mr. Bradbury himself disdained formal education. He went so far as to attribute his success as a writer to his never having gone to college.
Instead, he read everything he could get his hands on: Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway . He paid homage to them in 1971 in the essay “How Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries.” (Late in life he took an active role in fund-raising efforts for public libraries in Southern California.)
Mr. Bradbury referred to himself as an “idea writer,” by which he meant something quite different from erudite or scholarly. “I have fun with ideas; I play with them,” he said. “ I’m not a serious person, and I don’t like serious people. I don’t see myself as a philosopher. That’s awfully boring.” He added, “My goal is to entertain myself and others.”
He described his method of composition as “word association,” often triggered by a favorite line of poetry.
Rest in peace, Mr. Bradbury. 91 years is quite amazing. Thanks for inspiring me during my teaching years.
PS: The Washington Post has an interesting feature about the technological advancements imagined by Bradbury that would come true. It's very interesting stuff.
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