Ray Bradbury

Biography

American writer, born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920, a professional author from 1943 and died in Los Angeles in 2012. His best-known works are The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953), the latter expanded from the 1951 novella The Fireman and published by Ballantine Books in 1953; it received the 1954 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the 1954 Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal, the 1984 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award and a 2004 Retro Hugo Award. In later years he insisted repeatedly that the novel was not about state censorship but about mass media and entertainment marginalising the reading of literature, and that the culprit was the public rather than the government. He also received the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts and a 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.