Fahrenheit 451 (Hardcover)

Before he was 14, Ray Bradbury and his family moved several times to and from Waukegan, Illinois, where he was born, to Tucson, Arizona. In 1934 they moved to Los Angeles, where Bradbury has since spent most of life. After graduating from high school in 1938, he sold newspapers for four years on L. A. sidewalks, while publishing his own amateur science fiction magazine, his first story sale not coming until 1941. Turning his attention to full-time writing in 1943, Bradbury continued to write short stories, the best of which he compiled in 1947's DARK CARNIVAL collection. Through the 1950s and well into the 1960s, Bradbury was the reigning king of science fiction. Starting with the masterpiece THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1950), Bradbury's output from this period is fairly littered with classics; FAHRENHEIT 451 (1951), the collections THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (1951) and THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN (1953), SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1962), and the I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC collection (1969). Over his career, he has received numerous awards and honors, including having a crater on the moon named after his novel DANDELION WINE. His writing continued apace, but Bradbury began branching out in the 1960s, exploring scriptwriting, lecturing, and architecture; he served as a consultant on Walt Disney World's Epcot Center, the United States Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, as well as on other structures around the country. Though not much of his written work has been explicitly "science fiction," it has often contained enough of an element of the fantastic that he is primarily considered to be a science fiction writer. Even so, Bradbury has earned a prominent place in the pantheon of American literature.