Thursday, June 7, 2012

Ray Bradbury, Pulp God

Writing nonstop since his Waukegan, Ill., boyhood, Bradbury plied his trade in the 1940s mostly at pulps like Weird Tales and Dime Detective. (He managed to place a story in the New Yorker in 1947?his only appearance in the magazine.) It wasn't until 1950, with his novel The Martian Chronicles, that Bradbury experienced the career-altering moment that genre writers yearn for?the moment when a literary eminence from one of the slicks declares, "This man is one of Us." For Harlan Ellison, the benediction came from Dorothy Parker. For Bradbury it came from Christopher Isherwood, the British gadfly whose years spent in Weimar Germany gave him a soft spot for extraterrestrial life. Bradbury bumped into Isherwood at a Santa Monica, Calif.,?bookshop and pressed a copy of The Martian Chronicles into his hands. Isherwood later praised the book for its "sheer lift and power of a truly original imagination." Of Bradbury's technical prowess, he noted, "His interest in machines seems to be limited to their symbolic and aesthetic aspects. I doubt if he could pilot a rocket ship, much less design one."

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