In Ray Bradbury Unbound, Jonathan R. Eller continues the story begun in his acclaimed Becoming Ray Bradbury, following the beloved author's evolution from a short story master to a multi-media creative force and outspoken visionary. At the height of his powers as a poetic prose stylist, Bradbury shifted his creative attention to film and television, where new successes gave him an enduring platform as a compelling cultural commentator. His passionate advocacy validated the U.S. space program's mission, extending his pivotal role as a chronicler of human values in an age of technological wonders. Informed by many years of interviews with Bradbury as well as an unprecedented access to personal papers and private collections, Ray Bradbury Unbound provides the definitive portrait of how a legendary American author helped shape his times.

Becoming Ray Bradbury chronicles the making of an iconic American writer by exploring Ray Bradbury's childhood and early years of his long life in fiction, film, television, radio, and theater. Jonathan R. Eller measures the impact of the authors, artists, illustrators, and filmmakers who stimulated Bradbury's imagination throughout his first three decades. Unprecedented access to Bradbury's personal papers and other private collections provides insight into his emerging talent through his unpublished correspondence, his rare but often insightful notes on writing, and his interactions with those who mentored him during those early years.Beginning with his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, and Los Angeles, this biography follows Bradbury's development from avid reader to maturing author, making a living writing for the genre pulps and mainstream magazines. Eller illuminates the sources of Bradbury's growing interest in the human mind, the human condition, and the ambiguities of life and death--themes that became increasingly apparent in his early fiction. Bradbury's correspondence documents his frustrating encounters with the major trade publishing houses and his earliest unpublished reflections on the nature of authorship. Eller traces the sources of Bradbury's very conscious decisions, following the sudden success of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, to voice controversial political statements in his fiction. Eller also elucidates the complex creative motivations that yielded Fahrenheit 451. Becoming Ray Bradbury reveals Bradbury's emotional world as it matured through his explorations of cinema and art, his interactions with agents and editors, his reading discoveries, and the invaluable reading suggestions of older writers. These largely unexplored elements of his life pave the way to a deeper understanding of his more public achievements, providing a biography of the mind, the story of Bradbury's self-education and the emerging sense of authorship at the heart of his boundless creativity.

Celebrated storyteller, cultural commentator, friend of astronauts, prophet of the Space Age-by the end of the 1960s, Ray Bradbury had attained a level of fame and success rarely achieved by authors, let alone authors of science fiction and fantasy. He had also embarked on a phase of his career that found him exploring new creative outlets while reinterpreting his classic tales for generations of new fans. Drawing on numerous interviews with Bradbury and privileged access to personal papers and private collections, Jonathan R. Eller examines the often-overlooked second half of Bradbury's working life. As Bradbury's dreams took him into a wider range of nonfiction writing and public lectures, the diminishing time that remained for creative pursuits went toward Hollywood productions like the award-winning series Ray Bradbury Theater. Bradbury developed the Spaceship Earth narration at Disney's EPCOT Center; appeared everywhere from public television to NASA events to comic conventions; published poetry; and mined past triumphs for stage productions that enjoyed mixed success. Distracted from storytelling as he became more famous, Bradbury nonetheless published innovative experiments in autobiography masked as detective novels, the well-received fantasy The Halloween Tree and the masterful time travel story "The Toynbee Convector." Yet his embrace of celebrity was often at odds with his passion for writing, and the resulting tension continuously pulled at his sense of self. The revelatory conclusion to the acclaimed three-part biography, Bradbury Beyond Apollo tells the story of an inexhaustible creative force seeking new frontiers.

As a highly visual writer, Ray Bradbury's works have frequently been adapted for film and television. One of the most stylized and haunting dramatizations is Francois Truffaut's 1966 film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. For this fifth volume of The New Ray Bradbury Review, guest editor Phil Nichols brings together essays and articles that reflect upon Bradbury's classic novel and Truffaut's enduring low- tech science fiction film, fifty years after its release. French film director and writer Francois Truffaut was a major force in world cinema. Beginning with his first days as a firebrand film critic and early years as a highly original director, Truffaut sustained a career that brought him numerous accolades, including an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film. Yet Fahrenheit 451-his only film in English and his only foray into science fiction-is often overshadowed by the considerable triumphs of his other works, like The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and Day for Night. Similarly, while science fiction scholars often present the film as a significant work, they sometimes see it as a flawed adaptation, somehow less than its source, Ray Bradbury's classic 1953 novel of book-burning firemen. The articles in this volume represent the first scholarly investigation of Truffaut's film and Bradbury's novel together. They lay out the key critical issues in comparing book and film and novelist and filmmaker, discuss various aspects of Bradbury's and Truffaut's narrative strategies in creating a world where books are systematically burned, consider the film's screenplay and Bradbury's own creative reactions to Truffaut, and examine the reception of the film among various audiences and critics. The New Ray Bradbury Review and the multivolume Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury are the primary publications of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, the major archive of Bradbury's writings located at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).

Though it highlights just one year of writing, this third volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury represents a crucial moment at the midpoint of his first full decade as a professional writer. The original versions of the 1940s stories recovered for The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, presented in the order in which they were written and first sent of to find life in the magazine market, suggest that Bradbury's masks didn't always appeal to his editors. The Volume 3 stories were all written between March 1944 and March 1945, and the surviving letters of this period reveal the private con ict raging between Brad- bury's efforts to define a distinct style and creative vision at home in Los Angeles and the tyranny of genre requirements imposed by the distant pulp publishing world in New York. Most of the twenty-two stories composed during this pivotal year in his development re ect the impact of these creative pres- sures. is period also produced important markers in his maturing creativity with "The Miracles of Jamie," "Invisible Boy," and "Ylla," which were among the rst wave of Bradbury tales to reach the mainstream markets. The early versions of Bradbury's stories recovered for Volume 3, some emerging from his surviving typescripts and several that restore lost text preserved only in the rare Canadian serial versions, provide an unprecedented snapshot of his writing and his inspirations. Un- derlying this year of creativity was the expanding world of readings in modern and contemporary literature that would prove to be a crucial factor in his development as a master storyteller. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury is edited in compliance with the highest scholarly standards by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies and bears the Modern Language Association's seal of approval for scholarly editions. Each volume includes a general introduction, biographical timeline, summary of unpublished stories, historical commentaries for each story, textual apparatus, and a chronological catalog.

Ray Bradbury spent decades refashioning many of his early pulp and mainstream magazine stories to form the intricate story-cycle tapestries of The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine; other tales were revised or rewritten for such timeless collections as Dark Carnival, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and The October Country. These volumes represent wonderful and enduring fictional masks for the author, but they are not his original masks. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury series returns to the earliest surviving forms of his oldest published tales, presenting many of them in versions not seen since the 1940s and early 1950s, when the Golden Age of the American magazine began to pass into history. The restoration of these texts is a scholarly enterprise, including searches through long-lost typescripts, hundreds of elusive magazine issues, and thousands of textual variants, seeking to restore the author s earliest intentions for his first published stories. Jonathan R. Eller's textual commentaries document the history of the composition and publication of the stories and Bradburys emerging understanding of genre fiction from their original forms to the versions best known today. The second volume of the series includes twenty-five stories written between April 1943 and March 1944, and it contains eight stories that Bradbury never placed in his own story collections. These tales document an incredibly productive year that saw the twenty-three year-old writer move ever closer to becoming a masterful teller of timeless stories. For many of them, the original serial forms recovered in this volume differ significantly from the versions Bradbury popularized in his subsequent collections. For three of these stories, the original typescripts survive, making it possible to establish the critical text directly from the author's unstyled spellings and punctuation. By documenting the way the stories evolved over time, Eller reveals crucial new information about Bradbury s maturing creativity and poetic prose style. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury is edited in compliance with the highest scholarly standards by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies and bears the Modern Language Association's seal of approval for scholarly editions. Each volume includes a general introduction, biographical timeline, summary of unpublished stories, historical commentaries for each story, textual apparatus, and a chronological catalog.

Each previous The New Ray Bradbury Review, prepared and edited by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, examines the impact of Bradbury's writings on American culture and his legacy as one of the master storytellers of his time. The late Ray Bradbury's metaphor-rich imagination led to a prolific and highly influential career spanning seven decades, but it also left a decades-long field of deferred fragmentary fictions and story ideas that would remain unfulfilled creations. For Number 4, William F. Touponce, founding editor emeritus of the Review, has gathered and introduced fascinating examples of story ideas, brief story openings and endings, and extended story openings that will forever remain dreams deferred. The fragments presented in this issue illustrate Bradbury's progressive stages of creativity during story composition, and to that end some of the physical elements of presentation are preserved in layout. The selections are followed by a list of recent discoveries that supplement the comprehensive checklist of known fragments included in previous editions of the Review. Number 4 concludes with Jonathan Eller's "Fragmentary Futures," a survey of Bradbury's surviving preliminary outlines and projected timetables for future books-tenuous documents that convey a sense of the instability lurking beneath Bradbury's solid and enduring achievements as a masterful teller of tales. Number 4 of the Review completes the all-archival presentation begun with Number 3, which focused on the thematic range of the surviving fragments. The story openings presented in Number 4 reveal the hidden tension between Bradbury's subconscious inspirations and the stifling effects of his own self-conscious thoughts-the more logical thought patterns that he desperately tried to hold at bay during the few hours it would take him to complete an initial draft. Time and again, rational thought extinguished the initial subconscious upwelling of character and scene, causing him to set these fragments aside for a day that never came. The New Ray Bradbury Review and the multivolume Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury are the primary publications of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, the major archive of Bradbury's writings located at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).