Culture

Chronicles of a hot birthday

by ricknight | August 22, 2007 at 06:43 am

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It's the birthday of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, born in Waukegan, Illinois (1920). When he was 12 years old, a traveling carnival came to town, and Bradbury met a magician named Mr. Electrico, who talked to him about reincarnation and immortality, and those ideas excited Bradbury so much that he withdrew from his friends and devoted himself to his imagination. He said, "I don't know if I believe in previous lives, I'm not sure I can live forever. But that young boy believed in both, and I have let him have his [way]. He has written all my stories and books for me."

One night, Bradbury was out for a walk when a policeman pulled up on the side of the road to ask what he was doing. He said, "I was so irritated the police would bother to ask me what I was doing - when I wasn't doing anything - that I went home and wrote [a] story." That story became a novella called "The Fireman" and eventually grew into his first and best-known novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), about a man named Guy Montag who lives in a future world in which books are outlawed and burned wherever they're found. Montag is one of the firemen whose job it is to burn the books. One night he takes a book home that he was supposed to destroy and reads it. The act of reading persuades him to join an underground revolutionary group that is keeping literature alive.

Ray Bradbury said, "I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it."

From the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor. Available by e-mail daily.

Sure, he was required reading in high school and like all authors who were required reading, I hated him. Perhaps being told you have to read good literature ruins it.

One summer, in Yellowknife of all places, I wandered into a used bookstore. It had been decades after my enforced literary indoctrination and there was a decent anthology of his writing fo a couple of bucks. I didn't have anything else to read, so I spent that summer vacation under the long arctic sun reading The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes and discovering that he wasn't as bad as I believed I remembered.