Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. His father was a telephone lineman of English ancestry and his mother was an immigrant from Sweden. He spent his early childhood surrounded by his extended family, including an aunt who read him short stories and laid the foundation for his life as a writer. The family went back and forth between Tucson, Arizona, and Waukegan during the Great Depression as Bradbury’s father hunted for work. Bradbury’s memories of Waukegan in the 1920s became a kind of magical place in his fiction, the imaginary town of Green Town, Illinois, which appears in many of his later works. In 1934, when Bradbury was 14, the family settled in Los Angeles, California, where Bradbury would live for most of his remaining life.

Bradbury is best known as an author of classic science fiction and dark fantasy, most notably the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), the anthology The Martian Chronicles (1950), and the spooky, mysterious Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). Bradbury took a lyrical and intensely humanistic approach to his writing, emphasizing beautiful, almost magical language and focusing on the fundamental humanity of his characters. Today his stories are regarded as classics, and his shorter works, such as “All Summer in a Day” (1954) are commonly assigned reading as early as elementary school while his novels fill out high school and college reading lists.