Ray Bradbury was born on this date, August 22, in 1920. We lost him in 2012. Bradbury was one of the first science fiction and fantasy writers I read. A friend of our reading teacher came to class one day and read “The Screaming Woman” to us from the collection S is for Space. I was hooked.
The public library in Wichita Falls had a number of Bradbury paperbacks in the children’s section, mostly the editions that had a drawing of Bradbury on the cover. I’d seen them but didn’t really know what they were about. After the man read the story, I checked out every one of them. And when I read all of those, I tracked down the rest over the next few years. I was fortunate because not only were they all in print at the time, but new editions were being published. Those were the days.
A few weeks ago, something came across my twitter feed about the influence Henry Kuttner and Leigh Brackett had on Bradbury. They both mentored him, and Bradbury had written about his friendship with the two writers.
So I decided I could do a series of posts on those. They’ll start sometime in the next month. I’ve already got the first one planned. I just need to reread the stories I’ll discuss in it and then write the post. That will be after classes start next week.
