American science fiction author Ray Bradbury, 91, dies

By Katrina Jones Jun 6th, 2012 ( No Comment )

American science fiction author Ray Bradbury has died at the age of 91 on Tuesday night.

He was the author of Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and wrote about hundreds of novels, short stories, plays and television and film scripts.

“His legacy lives on in his monumental body of books, film, television and theater, but more importantly, in the minds and hearts of anyone who read him, because to read him was to know him. He was the biggest kid I know,” i09 science fiction blog quoted his grandson, Danny Karapetian, as saying.

Bradbury sold eight million copies of his books in 36 languages, according to The New York Times’ obit.

He was born in Illinois, and as a teenager moved with his family to Los Angeles. He attributed his success as a writer to never having gone to college—instead, he read and wrote voraciously.

“When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week,” he said in an interview with The Paris Review. “I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.”

According to BBC, Bradbury was passionate about literature. In 2008, he told The National Endowment for the Arts: “If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy.

“But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.”

Bradbury’s wife died in 2003. He had four daughters – Susan, Ramona, Bettina and Alexandra.