Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920 and moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1934. Libraries mattered more to his education than classrooms did, and he stayed a devoted library user for the rest of his life. He also wrote for the screen, co-writing John Huston's 1956 film Moby Dick and contributing to It Came from Outer Space. He died in Los Angeles in 2012, aged 91.
Bradbury moved between fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery, and he disliked being filed under science fiction, arguing that his work was really fantasy. The short story was his home ground: the Library of Congress counts more than 600 of them. They are lyrical, often nostalgic, and more interested in feeling than in machinery. The Martian Chronicles (1950) follows the colonizing of Mars through linked tales. The Illustrated Man (1951) is a collection of darker ones. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) is a carnival-set horror novel.
Fahrenheit 451 grew out of a shorter piece, The Fireman, which appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951. The novel followed from Ballantine in October 1953. It has been filmed twice, by François Truffaut in 1966 and for HBO in 2018. Bradbury received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2000, the National Medal of Arts in 2004, and a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 2007.
Start with Fahrenheit 451. It is short and fast, and it shows his poetic bent without any lead-in. If you want his range as a storyteller, move on to The Martian Chronicles, then to Something Wicked This Way Comes for his darker side.
