The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller Read Free Book Online

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    Ray spent the third and fourth years of his life sheltered by his mother, and fed, in part, by a bottle. His mind was fueled on a steady diet of movies, but at Christmas in 1925, Neva, a petite teenager, with short chestnut hair and striking gray eyes, gifted her little friend with true nourishment. Christmas at the Bradbury home had a simple, heartland charm that perfectly embodied a gathering of what Ray described as “a middle class—fallen on their luck” family. There was little money for presents. Still, each year, there was a tree in Ray’s house on St. James and at his grandparents’ home next door. Both trees were adorned with real candles. Neva always led the charge to decorate, for she loved holidays, particularly Christmas and Halloween.
    On Christmas Day, snow covered Waukegan. Ray and his brother, who slept together in a pull-out sofa bed in the living room, woke up eager, like all kids, to open their gifts. Among the packages under the tree was a present addressed to “Shorty,” Ray’s nickname. (Ray’s brother, Leonard Jr., now went by the nickname “Skip.”) The gift, from Neva was Once Upon a Time; it was his first fantasy book and it would change his life. (Though Ray Bradbury would later be pigeonholed by critics and scholars as a science fiction writer, he would maintain that if a label must be used at all, he was a fantasy writer.) Once Upon a Time was a collection of timeless fairy tales—“Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Tom Thumb,” “Cinderella,” and many others. First published by Rand McNally and Company in 1921, the collection was edited by Katharine Lee Bates, the author of the 1893 poem “America the Beautiful,” which would become, very literally, a second United States national anthem.
    Ray’s parents had been teaching their son how to read that winter of 1925. Fittingly, as he is a child of popular culture, Ray learned to read by studying the words in the Sunday comic strips. “They taught me by reading ‘Happy Hooligan,’ ‘Bringing up Father,’ and what have you.” While he relished the stories in Once Upon a Time , it was the lavish illustrations of Margaret Evans Price that captivated him. “Now, when I go into a bookstore,” Ray said at the age of eighty-two, “I rush right to the children’s section because of the illustrations.” It is certain that the early allure of illustration influenced Ray to direct the cover art of nearly all his books and even, in certain cases, the interior artwork. One might say that the reason Ray Bradbury’s work is so very visual, so driven by concrete imagery, springs in large part from his lifelong love of illustration—and of the cinema.
    When Ray was five, his aunt Neva showed him her collection of books, which included the Oz series, and he was enchanted. The series by L. Frank Baum was like nothing he had ever read; it was full of colorful illustrations and alive with myth and whimsy and dreams. “I have often thought that Neva was from Oz herself,” Ray wrote in a 1940s unpublished essay about his aunt, entitled “The Wingless Bat.” She launched the beginning of what he liked to call his “Journey to Far Metaphor.” Despite the very ordinary trappings of his life with his mother, father, and brother, and later, with his own wife and daughters, it was a journey that would never end.
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    T HE B RADBURY house on St. James Street in Waukegan was modest and ordinary. The home had only one bedroom, a tiny kitchen, a dining room, and a living room in which the boys slept. Leo and Esther’s bedroom was a tiny space consumed by a brass bed so long that its end stuck out of the sliding, double doorway at the entrance to the room. At the foot of the bed was a phonograph record player that Ray listened to frequently. His mother collected the phonograph albums,