Yes, “Becoming Ray Bradbury” is published by a university press, yet it isn’t at all academic. Every page is packed with fascinating material about one of this country’s most beloved writers, still with us in his 90s. If you’re a Bradbury fan, at the very least you’ll want to read it — and then, more likely than not, you’ll end up buying your own copy anyway.
Jonathan R. Eller knows his subject’s early life and literary career inside out, which is just what you’d expect from the co-founder of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. This book isn’t, however, a full biography; it only traces Bradbury’s career up to 1953, when its subject is all of 33. This is when the young writer set sail for Europe, where he would help develop the screenplay for John Huston’s “Moby Dick.”
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
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By then Ray Bradbury had already come a long way from the teenager who sold newspapers on a Los Angeles street corner, relied on the public library for most of the books he read and produced a fanzine called Futuria Fantasia. Because science fiction fandom resembles an extended family, its members often squabbling but indissolubly connected by a deep bond, early on Bradbury benefited from the mentorship of such masters of pulp fiction as Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett. Brackett, in particular, not only dissected the young writer’s juvenilia but also provided an early link to Hollywood. (As a young woman, Brackett worked with William Faulkner on the screenplay for “The Big Sleep”; nearly 40 years later, she worked with George Lucas on “The Empire Strikes Back.”)
By his early 20s, Bradbury began to be published in magazines like Weird Tales, Astounding, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, as well as several detective pulps. When at the typewriter, he would work as if possessed, whether by the Muse or by what Kipling called an inner Daemon, generally drafting a story in a single session. And what stories these were! Between 1941 and 1953, Bradbury produced such classics as “The Fog Horn,”“The Small Assassin,” “Zero Hour,” “The Veldt,” “The Pedestrian,” “The Next in Line” and “The Last Night of the World,” as well as “A Sound of Thunder,” the most iconic of modern time-travel tales. (That’s the one about the guy who kills a butterfly-like creature back in the age of dinosaurs and when he returns to the present discovers that he has changed history — for the worse, the much, much worse.)
By the middle 1940s, Bradbury had also broken into such upscale magazines as Collier’s, Mademoiselle, Charm and even the New Yorker. His style — richly metaphoric, and often lyrical or wistful in tone — had quickly separated him from that of the usual action-oriented pulp fictioneer. From the beginning, Bradbury was distinctly a prose-poet, lyricizing his own fears and yearnings, as obsessed with childhood as Wordsworth. Before long, the young author’s work began to be reprinted in annual anthologies of the year’s best short fiction. His admirers rapidly grew to include such literary eminences as Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden.
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