Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 5, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial Post. Retrospectively we all assume Bradbury was always on a track to become one of the 20th Century’s great short story writers. It is true that he trained himself by writing stories for the pulps, but both his early work and his late novels reveal a desire to be a screenwriter. This is young Ray, the writer who worked for John Huston, the Angeleno who was infected as deeply as anyone with the flickering glamour of cinema. I propose his three novels he wrote from age 65 to 82 — Death Is a Lonely Business (1985), A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990), and Let’s All Kill Constance (2002) — be called his Hollywood Trilogy. Autobiographical, tips of the fedora to Raymond Chandler, meditative and atmospheric backward-looking, these novels nurture a dream of a Bradbury who found his creative life in film and not on paper.

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 4, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial post. Since August is the centennial anniversary of the birth of Ray Bradbury -- and frankly, the publishing world seems a little too distracted to celebrate -- I will publish a daily huzza for the boy from Waukegan. And he would appreciate beginning near the end. Bradbury loved cats. He kept a author photo of himself holding a black cat years on his books out of relevance (I'll post that in the days ahead). Here is anothered honored cat in his writing room of his modest rancher in Cheviot Hills, Los Angeles, where he lived for 50 years. Note the walker, all the books, the man always at work with words.