Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 10, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. When Bradbury was 26 and barely having any luck selling short stories (The Martian Chronicles was 4 years away), he sold a radio play to ABC Radio. It was broadcast in 1947 starring James Whitmore, and it was collected in The Greatest One-Act Plays of 1947-48. "Not a bad start, eh?" he said in 2009. The legendary radio writer Norman Corwin was a tremendous influence on young Bradbury, and writing radio plays and later stage plays continued throughout his life. I remember only one collection of his plays, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays, which was published by Bantam, but I imagine other plays were printed in small quantities by small publishers. No one has done a collected plays edition, and of course you would have to include the radio plays, something no one does anymore. As you can see with this link, a theater in his birthplace of Waukegan IL is celebrating his centennial with radio plays productions. He would have loved that.