Ray Bradbury Has Died

By Jason Boog 

The great science fiction writer Ray Bradbury has passed away. He was 91-years-old. io9 broke the sad news this morning.

His 30 books included The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes and I Sing the Body Electric!, Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. His unforgettable body of work included nearly 600 short stories, earning a spot in more than 1,000 school anthologies.

Share your Bradbury memories in the comments section. In a Paris Review interview, the writer shared this thought: “I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school. ”

Here’s more about his early life as a writer, inspiration for all inspiring authors: “He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a ‘student of life,’ selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947.” (Via Sarah Weinman)