Ray Bradbury

Among the most beloved of America's classic authors, Ray Bradbury left us unforgettable voyages of the imagination, invitations to discover or renew a sense of speculative wonder. Here are four of these mythic journeys, gathered in one volume for the first time. In The Martian Chronicles--presented in a new, uncensored, complete, and authoritative text--he envisions the moment when humankind is finally able to leave the Earth on spaceships, escaping repression, racism, environmental catastrophe, and the ever-present peril of nuclear war, and beginning its colonial encounter with the alien mysteries of Mars. Fahrenheit 451 is set in a dystopian near future in which the freedom to read, and the printed word, are strictly forbidden: few remember the past or question the mindless entertainments which ensure authoritarian rule. Dandelion Wine asks us to travel to an ephemeral world now lost--to an archetypal Green Town, Illinois, much like the Waukegan of Bradbury's childhood--and to a time when summer seemed endless and magic still possible. A kind of sequel to Dandelion Wine but full of supernatural terrors rather than ordinary joys, Something Wicked This Way Comes follows two adolescent boys to a traveling carnival show that tests their natures like a nightmare: R. L. Stine has called it the scariest book I ever read, and Stephen King probably Bradbury's best. Also included here are a half-dozen shorter pieces--taken from rare pamphets, fanzines, and other hard-to-find sources and never-before reprinted--in which Bradbury reflects on the writing of the novels and stories included and on the sources of his creativity. Bradbury's definitive biographer Jonathan R. Eller provides a newly researched chronology of the author's life, and invaluable explanatory notes.