Many of these pieces were republished with new material in
The October Country (1955).
The publication of The Martian Chronicles (1950) established Bradbury's reputation as an author of sophisticated science fiction. This collection of stories is connected by the framing device of the settling of Mars by human beings and is dominated by tales of space travel and environmental adaptation. Bradbury's themes, however, reflect many of the important issues of the post-World War II era--racism, censorship, technology, and nuclear war--and the stories delineate the implications of these themes through authorial commentary. Clifton Fadiman described The Martian Chronicles as being "as grave and troubling as one of Hawthorne's allegories." Another significant collection of short stories, The Illustrated Man (1951), also uses a framing device, basing the stories on the tattoos of the title character.
Bradbury's later short story collections are generally considered to be less significant than The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Bradbury shifted his focus in these volumes from outer space to more familiar earthbound settings. Dandelion Wine (1957), for example, has as its main subject the midwestern youth of Bradbury's semiautobiographical protagonist, Douglas Spaulding.
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