Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, the iconic author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, believed that a collection of his letters could someday illuminate the story of his life in new ways. That story emerges across time and memory in the pages of Remembrance.

Ray Bradbury was one of the best-known writers and creative dreamers of our time. The many honors he received, which included an Emmy and Academy Award nomination for adaptations of his work, culminated in the 2000 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a 2004 National Medal of Arts, and a 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. For many years NASA and the Disney Studio felt the impact of Ray Bradbury’s creativity, and his fiction has found its way into hundreds of anthologies, textbooks, and the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read program. His enduring legacy as a storyteller, novelist, and space-age visionary radiated out into popular adaptations for stage, film, and television, and now the fascinating narratives and insights of his personal and professional correspondence are revealed for the first time.

Remembrance offers the first sustained look at his life in letters from his late teens to his ninth decade. Bradbury’s correspondence was far-reaching--he interacted with a rich cross-section of 20th-century cultural figures, writers, film directors, editors, and others who simply wanted insights or encouragement from a writer who had enriched their lives through his stories and novels.

Bradbury scholar and biographer, Jonathan R. Eller, organized this volume into categories of correspondents, showing Bradbury’s progression through life as he knew it, and not necessarily as the public perceived him. Letters to and from mentors and other writers are followed by correspondence with such film directors as John Huston, François Truffaut, and Federico Fellini. Letters with publishers and agents are followed by letters that capture moments of national and international recognition, the shadows of war and family members who shared the memories of his life. Among the writers whose letters illuminate Remembrance are Theodore Sturgeon, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Twilight Zone writers Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, Dan Chaon, Bernard Berenson, Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Anaîs Nin, Gore Vidal, Carl Sandburg, and Jessamyn West.

Remembrance illuminates the most elusive aspect of Ray Bradbury’s wide-ranging writing passions--the correspondence he sent and received throughout his long life, each letter intended for an audience of one.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was the author of more than three dozen books, including Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, as well as hundreds of short stories. He wrote for the theater, cinema, and TV, including the screenplay for John Huston’s Moby Dick and the Emmy Award-winning teleplay The Halloween Tree, and adapted for television sixty-five of his stories for The Ray Bradbury Theater. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and numerous other honors.

Dr. Jonathan R. Eller is a Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus and cofounder of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University’s School of Liberal Arts. His most recent books include the biographical trilogy Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo, which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2021. Since 2011, he has prefaced and prepared new historical sections for Simon & Schuster’s latest editions of Catch-22, Fahrenheit 451, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Four of Professor Eller’s books on Bradbury have been Locus Award finalists for best nonfiction title in the science fiction and fantasy field.