[This entry was updated by Gary K. Wolfe (Roosevelt University) from his entry in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, pp. 16-33.]

Although Ray Bradbury remains perhaps the best known of all science-fiction writers, and although his stories and themes have permeated all areas of American culture as have those of no other science-fiction writer--through more than five hundred stories, poems, essays, plays, films, television plays, radio, music, and even comic books----Bradbury is still something of an anomaly in the genre. In a field that thrives on the fantastic and the marvelous, Bradbury's best stories celebrate the mundane; in a field preoccupied with the future, Bradbury's vision is firmly rooted in the past--both his own personal past and the past of America. In a popular genre where reputations, until recently, have been made through ingenious plotting and the exposition of scientific and technological ideas, Bradbury built...