Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, and his family settled in Los Angeles in 1934, when he was 14. He did not go to college. After high school he sold newspapers on a street corner and educated himself in public libraries. "Libraries raised me," he said. He sold his first stories to pulp magazines in the early 1940s.

The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951) made his name. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) grew from "The Fireman", a novella he typed on a rented typewriter in the basement of the UCLA library, at ten cents per half hour. The novel imagines an America where firemen burn books. The state enforces it, but people gave up reading first, for fast entertainment and to avoid offending anyone. The title is the temperature at which, he was told, book paper burns.

Bradbury wrote some 600 short stories, the novels Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the screenplay for John Huston's Moby Dick (1956). He died in Los Angeles in 2012, aged 91, and left his personal library to the public library of Waukegan.