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
The first addition by the CRBS to the critical editions edited at the Institute for American Thought is The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, Volume One (1938-1943). Edited by William F. Touponce and Jonathan R. Eller, the edition is published by Kent State University Press. Inaugurating a series of volumes on this celebrated American science fiction and fantasy author, the edition bears the MLA's seal of approval for scholarly editions.
The latest volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, prepared by the editorial staff of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, was published in September 2014 by The Kent State University Press. This second volume of the projected eight-volume series (1938-1950) includes twenty-five stories written between April 1943 and March 1944; among these are eight stories that Bradbury never placed in his own story collections during his lifetime.
The volumes in the Collected Stories series return to the earliest surviving forms of his oldest published tales, presenting many of them in versions not seen since the 1940s and early 1950s, when the Golden Age of American magazines began to pass into history. The original magazine forms recovered in this volume differ significantly from the versions that Bradbury popularized in his subsequentcollections and novels. For three of these stories (“The Shape of Things,” “The Man Upstairs,” and “Where Everything Ends”), the original typescripts survive, making it possible to establish the critical text directly from the author’s unstyled spellings and punctuation. By documenting the way these stories evolved over time, General Editor Jonathan Eller reveals crucial new information about Bradbury’s maturing creativity and poetic prose style.
2005 Locus Award Finalist,
Best Non-Fiction
Praise for The Life of Fiction:
“A model of good scholarship, this volume details each of Bradbury’s numerous writings from initial draft through various editions.”
— Choice
“Important, scrupulously researched, ingeniously built, complexly human…”
— Extrapolation
“Moving from the influence of the carnivalesque on Bradbury’s style to his meticulous revision process to his unique reception as both a serious and a popular writer, this chronicle details Bradbury’s influence through the course of sixty years.”
— American Literature
“I’ve been diving deeper into the book during the last few days. It’s an incredible thing that you have done. Not only are you revealing me to other people, but you are revealing me to myself…I hadn’t realized that my creative muse, my demon, lodged inside my psyche somewhere, ran so deep and so strange…you have managed to fuse your lives with mine and come up with a terrific adventure.”
— Ray Bradbury
Institute for American Thought
0010 Education/Social Work
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
Indianapolis, Indiana, 46202-5157 USA
Phone: (317) 278-3374
Fax: (317) 274-2170
Email: iat@iupui.edu
