Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American fantasy and science fiction author. He was born on August 22nd, 1920, in Waukegan Illinois, where he grew up until moving to Los Angeles in 1934. After concluding high school in Los Angeles, Bradbury didn’t attend college and instead self-taught by visited the library 3 times a week for 10 years. Bradbury’s childhood love for magic, watching horror films, and reading adventure and fantasy shaped his subject matter, which primarily entailed of imaginary worlds like his own but with one particular twist. Bradbury’s untraditional secondary education and wild imagination set him apart, and thus many of his stories feature a unique (both positively and negatively) child. He also experienced a lot of death from a young age, as his grandfather and sister both died when he was young, and his older brother died right before he was born. As a result, Bradbury explores death in several of his stories.

Bradbury published his first short stor, Hollerbochen’s Dillema in 1938 in Imagination! Magazine. He went on to begin his own magazine, Future Fantasia, in 1939, which he filled almost entirely with self-written works. In 1947, Bradbury published his first short story collection “Dark Carnival”, which included some of his more well known works like The Small Assassin, Jack-In-The-Box, and The Scythe. His best known work, Fahrenheit 451, was published in 1953. Over the course of his lengthy career, Bradbury published over 30 books, 600 short stories, and several plays, screenplays, essays, and poems. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Prometheus Award, an Emmy, National Medal of Arts, a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize jury, and induction into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Bradbury passed away due to illness at age 91 on June 5, 2012 in Los Angeles.