Throughout his career Bradbury has also written many realistic tales, sympathetic stories about Mexicans, Irishmen, Chicanos. Though his subject matter is diverse, a native regionalism characterizes his work. Bradbury's Mars bears a similarity to the American Midwest, and behind Los Angeles and Dublin and all towns on Bradbury's map lies the archetypal village--"Green Town, Illinois." Most of the literary models identified by critics are facades too. Bradbury is only superficially in the school of Heinlein, or Poe, or O. Henry. His real affinity, in lighter moments, is with something like Steinbeck's comedies of folk tenacity. In his darker moods (and these are more numerous) he echoes the Anderson of Winesburg, Ohio, the writer of "grotesques." Scratch the surface in Bradbury and eminently native patterns emerge. The real Bradbury is a portraitist, less the chronicler of Mars than of twisted, small-town American lives.
There is the same centripetal aspect to Bradbury's life. Born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920, he came west with his parents during the Depression. He has lived in Los Angeles with his wife and four daughters ever since. There was a sojourn in Ireland during the filming of Moby Dick, for which he wrote the screenplay; he has made frequent trips to Mexico--but he was always a tourist, even in Los Angeles, even on Mars.
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