Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born 22 August 1920 and spent five decades turning pulp genres into something closer to poetry. The Martian Chronicles arrived in 1950, then The Illustrated Man in 1951 - short story collections that used other worlds to examine this one. Fahrenheit 451 followed in 1953, a novel about a fireman who burns books in a society that has outlawed them, and it became his most enduring work. He kept writing across forms: the nostalgic Dandelion Wine in 1957, the dark carnival novel Something Wicked This Way Comes in 1962, screenplays for Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space, plus television scripts and poetry collections. The New York Times credited him as "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream." He died 5 June 2012.