Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois in 1920 but grew up in Los Angeles, California. While in high school, he began writing short stories—a hobby that quickly turned into a life calling. In 1941, he sold his first short story to a magazine called
Super Science Stories. After publishing in niche magazines for a few years, one of Bradbury’s stories was included in the 1946 edition of
The Best American Short Stories, a popular annual publication. This, along with the 1953 publication of
Fahrenheit 451, propelled Bradbury to literary fame. Bradbury penned eleven novels in total, and all of them began as short stories, which he strung together in varying degrees to create a longer, more complex narrative. For example, in
The Illustrated Man, the eighteen stories (all of which had already been published in magazines) can stand alone but also build on each other when read in succession. When he died at the age of 91, Bradbury had published several hundred short stories and received multiple honors, including a National Medal of the Arts, a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, an Oscar nomination, and an Emmy Award. Bradbury married Marguerite McClure in 1947, and the pair were married until her death in 2003. The couple had four daughters together, Susan, Ramona, Bettina, and Alexandra.