Fahrenheit 451 cost nine dollars eighty in rentals
Ray Bradbury (22 August 1920 – 5 June 2012) made speculative tales feel like serious literature, mixing Martian dreams with book-burning dread. He expanded a Galaxy short called The Fireman into Fahrenheit 451 in a UCLA typing room that charged ten cents per half-hour—about $9.80 for a fifty-thousand-word novel.
Born in Waukegan, Illinois, to Swedish immigrant Esther Moberg Bradbury and lineman Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, he took the middle name Douglas after Fairbanks. Extended family and an aunt’s stories seeded Green Town, the fictional Waukegan of his fiction. After Tucson interludes the family reached Los Angeles in 1934 with forty dollars; his father soon earned fourteen dollars a week at a cable plant. At fourteen he sold a joke to George Burns for Burns and Allen. Labor Day weekend 1932, carnival performer Mr. Electrico tapped him with an electrified sword and cried “Live forever!”—Bradbury dated his daily writing habit from that shock.
Carnegie Library shelves offered Wells, Verne, and Poe; he imitated Poe into his late teens and drafted a Burroughs-style Mars sequel at twelve. Rejected for wartime service over bad eyesight, he published in fanzines from 1938, met Heinlein and others at the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, and sold “Pendulum” (with Henry Hasse) for fifteen dollars in November 1941. Solo story “The Lake” brought $13.75 at twenty-two; by twenty-four he wrote full-time. Dark Carnival (1947) launched him; Truman Capote plucked “Homecoming” from Mademoiselle’s slush pile into the O. Henry Awards.
The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—titled after the Los Angeles fire chief’s claim that book paper burns at 451 °F—made him famous. He resisted pure “sci-fi” labels, calling the genre “the art of the possible,” and credited Verne, Wells, and Heinlein’s humanistic example. A New York Times tribute credited him above others with moving contemporary speculative fiction into respected literary company.
Source: Ray Bradbury
