ray bradbury

Ray Bradbury is dead at ninety-one. He was one of the great writers of our time. Not as a science fiction writer, but as a wonderful seer, in a class with the greatest writers.

He was not technichnically innovative, and when he wrote what is called "science fiction," he was no better than other generic hacks.

But at his best, Ray Bradbury was a beautiful writer who was superbly moving.

I met Ray Bradbury when I was a freshman in college. I bought a copy of The Golden Apples of the Sun. It was full of beautiful stories. I was seventeen years old, and it moved me to tears of joy.

I read more. I loved his stories. And then, in my senior year, I read Dandelion Wine. I was off to be a Marine Corps lieutenant, and Bradbury didn't help me to go. I thought constantly of his stories, particularlý of Dandelion Wine, and when--with a bad fitness report--I went off to Camp LeJeune as an infantry officer, I took Ray Bradbury with me.

I set up a "library" in my company's barracks. There was resistance from the Staff NCOs.. The kids--"men"--mostly read what were called "skin books"; my little library contained books by Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker. Mary Shelley, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger. People my miserably educated self had read.

All that stuff was considered "subversive." But when kids borrowed those books, they often read them and kept them. I simply replaced them..

The Bradbury books regularly disappeared. Kids would borrow them, and keep them. And I woulld buy new copies. After a while, I would buy several copies at a time. I was happy that they wanted to keep them.

When I first started teaching in university, I was afraid to assign Bradbury stories. They weren't part of the "canon" of serious literature. By the time I was my own, as a professor, I didn't try to teach Ray Bradbury; I just recommended him--and found numerous students who took to him.

Ray Bradbury was a humane genius. A gifted man who said beautiful things. A wonderful man who saw beautiful things. This world--certainly this very small part of it called "me"--is so very much the better because of him, and his writing, and his life.

Thank you, Ray Bradbury.

Sincerely,

BertHornback