In the spring of 2007, IUPUI's School of Liberal Arts created the nation's first center for the study of science fiction and fantasy author Ray Bradbury (1920–2012), one of the best-known American cultural figures of the twentieth century. During his seven-decade career, Bradbury published more than four hundred stories and the books that grew out of them, including The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The October Country, and two enduring titles that emerged from his early Midwestern years—Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Fahrenheit 451, his classic cautionary tale of censorship and book burning, remains a perennial bestseller more than sixty years after publication.
With the encouragement of the late Mr. Bradbury and a number of scholars, fellow writers, and collectors, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies has been able to build a comprehensive multiple-source research archive. The Center has gone on to establish, in partnership with the Kent State University Press, a journal, The New Ray Bradbury Review, and a Modern Language Association seal-approved critical edition, The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, an eight-volume series that recovers the seldom-seen earliest versions of his oldest tales.
The Center also maintains a large research library of Bradbury's publications (including many foreign language editions of his books and scarce copies of the pulp genre magazines where many of his earliest stories were first published), as well as anthologies and reference books for the broader study of science fiction and fantasy.
During the fall of 2013, these resources were suddenly transformed into one of the nation’s premier single-author archives by the arrival of two landmark gifts that, together, comprise most of the working archives and personal artifacts remaining in Mr. Bradbury’s home at the time of his passing in June 2012. Mr. Bradbury’s longtime friend and principal bibliographer, Donn Albright, donated the author’s books and papers, which he had received as a personal bequest. The resulting Bradbury-Albright Collection now forms the centerpiece of what we have designated the Bradbury Memorial Archive, consisting of a direct gift to the Center from the Bradbury family. This gift consists of Mr. Bradbury’s office bookcases and furniture (including two desks and three typewriters dating from the 1950s), his voice recordings, selected motion picture and television adaptations of his work, his last forty years of incoming correspondence, and a lifetime of awards and mementos.
If you wish to contact the Center, please e-mail or write to the director:
Jonathan R. Eller
Director, Center for Ray Bradbury Studies
jeller@iupui.edu
A brief biography for Ray Bradbury.
A bibliography of Ray Bradbury's work.
"A poem written on learning that Shakespeare and Cervantes both died on the same day."
— Ray Bradbury
Great Shakespeare lost, Cervantes gone
The sun at noon goes down. The dawn
Refuses light. Time holds its breath
At this coincidence of death
Then can it be? and is it so
That these twin gods to darkness go
All in a day! and none to stop
The harvesting of this fell crop
Each in its field, and each so bright
They, burning, hurled away the night.
Yet night returns to seize its due,
One Spirit Spout? No! Death takes two.
First one. The world goes wry from lack
Then two! tips world to balance back.
Two Comet strikes within a week,
First Spain, then dumbstruck England's cheek.
The world grinds mute in dreads and fears
Antarctica melts down to tears,
And Caesars ghosts erupted, rise
All bleeding Amazons from eyes,
An age has ended, yet must stay
As witness to a brutal day
When witless God left us alone
By deathing Will, then Spanish clone.
Who dares to try and gauge each pen
We shall not see such twins again.
Shakespeare is lost, Cervantes dead?
The conduits of God are bled
And gone the Light, and shut the clay
Two Titans gone within a day,
Two felled by one sure stroke of death,
Christ gapes his wounds. God stops his breath.
And we are staggered by twin falls
The vastness of the day appalls
As if a tribunal of Kings
From Caesars down to our Royal Things,
A pageant of rich royalty
Were drowned in Time's obscenity.
Who ordered thus: "Two giants - die."
First one and then our other eye
God shut the great, then greatest dream
One not enough? No, it would seem
A void half full if Shakespeare, done
Went down to doom at sunset's gun.
So then lamenting, then with laugh,
God seized and filled the other half.
Cervantes pulled across the sill
To heart of Comet brim and fill.
God sent both forth, twin stars whose fire
Birthed whales and beauteous beasts for hire
And long years since we beg for rides
Where Cervantes plus Shakespeare hides
Their fall? knocked echoes round the Stage
And still we reckon our outrage
Because where is the sense in this
Our left hand and our right we miss
Which clapped together made applause
For God and Primal Cosmic Cause.
But Cervantes and Bard strewn cold
Two wild Dreams in one dumb soil mold?
Let all the echoes flow in tides
Where comets are their flowering brides
And Cervantes and bawdy Will
Do windmill fight our hopes uphill
And rouse us up in nightmare bed
To cry: Quixote, Hamlet, dead?
In one fell day? Get off! Get. Go!
Such funerals I will not know.
Their graves, their stones, these I refuse.
Lend me their books, show me their Muse.
By end of day or, latest, week,
I bid Cervantes/Shakespeare speak
To brim my heart, to fill my head
With what? Good Don. Fine Lear. Not dead. Not dead!
Ray Bradbury
August 22, 1920–June 5, 2012
Ray Bradbury was a child of the Midwest, a small-town dreamer who was determined to become a writer from the age of twelve. He realized these dreams in Los Angeles, where his parents found a new life in 1934, the fifth year of the Great Depression. Ray turned fourteen that summer, and went on to graduate from Los Angeles High School in 1938. But the core of his education came from library books; he would spend his long life celebrating the written word, and safeguarding the books and libraries that define our humanity and our values.
He hated intolerance, and those who deny the existence of intolerance. He was not afraid to write about and condemn the evils of prejudice and racial inequality at a time when such stories were hard to publish in America. In 1953, his stories about societies that destroy the precious gifts of imagination and creativity by destroying books culminated in Fahrenheit 451, a modern classic that, more than any other novel, has come to symbolize the importance of preserving literacy and literature in an age dominated by multi-media entertainment.
Ray Bradbury’s enduring early story collections and novels, often transcending genre boundaries, have remained in print for more than half a century. Aldous Huxley called him a prose poet, recognizing his rich metaphorical language and lyric style. Four generations of school children have read his stories; many of today’s astronauts and scientists first turned their eyes to the skies after reading The Martian Chronicles and such stories as “R Is for Rocket” and “The Golden Apples of the Sun.”
All his life, Ray Bradbury firmly believed that Humanity is destined to reach the stars. He would often tell students that his job was “to find the metaphor that explains the Space Age, and along the way to write stories.” Above all, he celebrated the celestial grandeur of the Cosmos, and called us all to consider our place in it. In June 2000, he urged Caltech’s graduating class “to witness, to celebrate, and to be part of this universe . . . you’re here one time, you’re not coming back. And you owe, don’t you? You owe back for the gift of life.”
Jon Eller
Drector,
Center for Ray Bradbury Studies
