
Other works include The October Country, Dandelion Wine, A Medicine for Melancholy, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric!, Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. In an attempt to salvage their history and culture, a group of rebels memorize entire works of literature and philosophy as their books are burned by the totalitarian state. Next came The Illustrated Man and then, in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, which many consider to be Bradbury's masterpiece, a scathing indictment of censorship set in a future world where the written word is forbidden. His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended consequences. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Ray Douglas Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born Augin Waukegan, Illinois.

Even though most were written in the 1940s and 1950s, these 18 classic stories will be just as chillingly effective 50 years from now. Or "Zero Hour," in which invading aliens have discovered a most logical ally-our own children.

Or "Kaleidoscope," a heartbreaking portrait of stranded astronauts about to reenter our atmosphere-without the benefit of a spaceship.

What's even more remarkable, and increasingly disturbing, is that the illustrations are themselves magically alive, and each proceeds to unfold its own story, such as "The Veldt," wherein rowdy children take a game of virtual reality way over the edge. In an ingenious framework to open and close the book, Bradbury presents himself as a nameless narrator who meets the Illustrated Man-a wanderer whose entire body is a living canvas of exotic tattoos. Only his second collection (the first was Dark Carnival, later reworked into The October Country), it is a marvelous, if mostly dark, quilt of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. That The Illustrated Man has remained in print since being published in 1951 is fair testimony to the universal appeal of Ray Bradbury's work.
