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This chapter discusses Ray Bradbury's writings on Mars, with a particular focus on The Martian Chronicles (1950). It covers his discovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs' fiction at the age of ten; his early Mars stories; his composition of The Martian Chronicles; his efforts to move away from clichéd images of extraterrestrials; his emphasis on a seepage between the consciousnesses of his Earthlings and Martians; how the Martians in his stories emerge as projections or distorted mirror images of the human settlers; his emphasis of the importance of dwellings in The Martian Chronicles; and his later Mars publications. The final section of the chapter discusses how the Martian story “Usher II” engages most directly with the enforcement of literary censorship.

This chapter focuses on Ray Bradbury's auspicious year as a writer during the winter and spring of 1950. Between the fall of 1949 and the fall of 1950, Bradbury submitted major works such as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man to various publications. His readers were beginning to make little distinction between his science fiction, his fantasy, and his semiautobiographical Green Town stories. Finally, Don Congdon was overcoming major market editorial resistance to Bradbury's stylistic originality and his specialized subjects. This chapter examines Bradbury's remarkable successes during the first weeks of 1950, which saw his science fiction tales “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “To the Future” being bought by Collier's, and “The Illustrated Man” by Esquire. It also discusses other significant developments in Bradbury's career, including a productive publishing visit to New York, his return to California to receive his “Invisible Little Man” award, and make his keynote address at the Bay Area society's annual banquet.

This chapter focuses on Ray Bradbury's anxiety about long fiction amid critical praise in 1951. By the time Bradbury's Miracle Year had run its course, he had successfully built a new story collection around the Illustrated Man framing device. And with the February 1951 release of his second Doubleday book, Bradbury was beginning to solidify his reputation as a major market book author. This chapter starts with a discussion of the critical acceptance for Bradbury's The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles, focusing on their favorable reviews, their publication in major American and British trade houses, and the mass-market paperback contracts Bradbury received for both of them. It then examines Bradbury's private worry about whether he would be able to build book-length success, similar to what he achieved with the Chronicles, out of an expansion of “The Fireman” novella. Finally, it looks at Don Congdon's advice for Bradbury to pursue the conventional realism of the Mexican stories and develop them into a 60,000-word novel.

The digitized copy of The Martian Chronicles, along with many other stories, novels, and science fiction art inspired by the Red Planet, finally reached Mars aboard the Phoenix lander in 2008. Chapter 43 describes Bradbury’s final trip to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory the following year, the publication of his last story collection, We’ll Always Have Paris (2008), and the passing of Don Congdon, his agent for more than sixty years. Bradbury had come to measure each story he finished as one more victory over death, but the stories were coming more slowly now. Bradbury’s reflections on mortality during the final decades of his life, and his unfinished plans for a final story collection, close out chapter 43.

This chapter focuses on Ray Bradbury's phenomenal year as a writer during the summer and fall of 1950. A chance meeting with Christopher Isherwood at a Los Angeles bookstore in early July 1950 provided the critical breakthrough that Bradbury needed to bring The Martian Chronicles more fully into mainstream literary appreciation. The timing of Bradbury's review copy gift could not have been better; Isherwood had just agreed to write extended book reviews for Tomorrow, a new literary magazine. Isherwood's review of the Chronicles appeared in the October 1950 issue of Tomorrow. This chapter first considers the impact of Isherwood's friendship on Bradbury's career before turning to Bradbury's new “Illustrated Man” concept for Doubleday and his creation of a 100-page typescript titled Long after Midnight. It also discusses Bradbury's deal with Bantam for an anthology of new fantasy and science fiction stories.

Ray and Maggie Bradbury’s winter 1990 stay in Paris began as Bradbury successfully negotiated a fortieth anniversary hardbound edition of The Martian Chronicles from Doubleday. Chapter 26 also narrates how Bradbury discovered that his perennial popularity in Eastern Europe was expanding as the Iron Curtain collapsed, especially in Czechoslovakia, where newly elected President Vaclav Havel proved to be a Bradbury enthusiast. The chapter closes with Bradbury’s unexpected invitation to a May 1990 luncheon for President Gorbachev held at the Russian Embassy in Washington. Bradbury and Isaac Asimov were invited as the favorite writers of the Gorbachev family. Bradbury was also beginning to learn of the scattered and informal Bradbury reading clubs that had existed in Russia throughout much of the Cold War period.

This chapter reflects on Ray Bradbury's career, describing him as a writer who never really fit the genres he was assigned to. It begins with a discussion of Fahrenheit 451, a novel that illustrates how the ideas in Bradbury's science fiction, often dark and occasionally hopeful, had become cautionary. For Bradbury, the future danger was not technology, but the humans who will control it. The nuclear war that closes both “The Fireman” and Fahrenheit 451 ran parallel to a number of mid-century Bradbury stories, such as “The Last Night of the World” and the last four tales in The Martian Chronicles. This chapter also considers Bradbury's strengths and shortcomings as a creative writer, one who could not resist the temptation of playing the storyteller with details of his own life, but also absolutely true to his public convictions; his desire to be true to his Muse, to write for himself with little regard for outside pressures, has been a constant hallmark of his writing career.