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.

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 3, 2020 -- Inaugural post

Ray Bradbury was born 100 years ago on August 22nd. Happy Centennial to a writer who shaped my life from the scary and fantastical stories I read when I was 12 to the novels of my teens, to the poet I read in college, to the magician I followed for decades and decades now! Hard Case Crime is promising to bring out this collection on August 18th, and it is like the promise of cool water in a desert. Rowan and I assembled a page dedicated to Bradbury on our website, and I have activated it today: http://www.whistlestoppers.com/ray-bradbury

Ray Bradbury Centennial post August 9, 2020

Daily Ray Bradbury Centennial Post. From 1985 to 1992 on HBO and the USA Network 65 episodes of the Ray Bradbury Theater presented selections from the deep inventory of Bradbury’s short stories. The anthology series was a who’s who of guest stars from William Shatner and Peter O’Toole to Jean Stapleton and Lucy Lawless. The intro in the beginning featured Bradbury walking into his home office and narrating his approach to writing. Also in early years he introduced or made comments on episodes, and he had the creative power to slip in small self-referential touches, causing stories to touch other stories in his oeuvre, so to speak. Herewith his original introduction, so you can see the man, age 65, and hear his voice.