100 Fun Facts About Ray Bradbury

In which Illinois town was Ray Bradbury born in 1920?

The lakeside town north of Chicago became 'Green Town, Illinois' in his fiction, the setting of Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Bradbury's parents gave him his middle name in honour of which swashbuckling silent-film star?

He later gave the name to Douglas Spaulding, the 12-year-old hero of Dandelion Wine who is loosely modelled on the author himself.

Which carnival performer touched 12-year-old Bradbury with an electrified sword and shouted 'Live, forever!'?

Bradbury said he went home from that Labor Day 1932 show, started writing within days and never stopped.

Bradbury's first pay as a writer, at age 14, came from selling a joke to which radio comedian?

He used to roller-skate around Hollywood hoping to meet celebrities, and the gag was used on the Burns and Allen radio show.

Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on rented typewriters in the basement of which university library?

The machines cost ten cents per half-hour, and the manuscript ran to about 50,000 words.

Roughly how much did Bradbury spend on typewriter rental to write Fahrenheit 451?

The novel was published by Ballantine in 1953 after an editor there urged him to expand it from a novella.

According to Bradbury, who told him that book paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit?

The number has been disputed by scientists ever since, but the title stuck and became shorthand for censorship.

Fahrenheit 451 grew out of which 1951 novella Bradbury published in Galaxy Science Fiction?

The 25,000-word novella already had the book-burning premise; a Ballantine editor urged him to expand it into a full novel.

In Fahrenheit 451, Montag's wife Mildred is obsessed with the 'family' she watches on what?

She panics at the thought of losing the house and her wall-sized entertainment when Montag suggests quitting.

In Fahrenheit 451, who is the free-spirited teenage neighbour who makes Montag question his life?

In Truffaut's 1966 film, Julie Christie played both this character and Montag's wife, an idea Bradbury later called a mistake.

How many legs does the Mechanical Hound have in Fahrenheit 451?

The robotic creature lives in the firehouse and helps the firemen track down people who hoard books.

Who is Montag's fire chief in Fahrenheit 451, the man who explains how books lost their value?

He warns that a fireman caught with a book would be asked to burn it within twenty-four hours.

Faber, the retired professor who helps Montag in Fahrenheit 451, gives him what device?

It lets Faber whisper guidance remotely, until Beatty discovers the earpiece and vows to hunt him down.

Which book of the Bible does Montag realise he has partly memorised at the end of Fahrenheit 451?

The exiled book-lovers each 'become' a book, and the group has a way of unlocking photographic memory.

Fahrenheit 451 was serialised in 1954 in which magazine?

The March, April and May issues carried it, in the magazine's first year of publication.

Which French New Wave director filmed Fahrenheit 451 in 1966?

He spoke almost no English, kept a diary of the shoot and had the opening credits spoken aloud rather than printed.

Who played Montag in the 1966 film of Fahrenheit 451?

Aznavour was Truffaut's first choice and Stamp was cast before dropping out, worried about being overshadowed by Julie Christie's dual role.

Who starred as Montag in the 2018 HBO television film of Fahrenheit 451?

Ramin Bahrani directed it; like the 1966 version, it drew mixed reviews.

Bradbury said Fahrenheit 451 was partly inspired by which dictator's purge of writers and poets?

His line on the Great Purge was 'They burned the authors instead of the books.'

Fahrenheit 451 received a 'Retro' Hugo Award in which year?

Retro Hugos are awarded decades later for years when no Hugos were given; the novel had already won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1984.

The Martian Chronicles was published in which year?

Doubleday suggested weaving his existing Mars stories into a 'fix-up' novel after Bradbury travelled to New York in 1949 to be 'discovered'.

Under what title was The Martian Chronicles first published in the United Kingdom?

The 1951 British edition also had slightly different contents from the American one.

A chance meeting with which British expatriate writer got The Martian Chronicles to a respected critic?

The encounter happened in a Los Angeles bookstore, and Isherwood's enthusiasm helped lift Bradbury out of the pulps.

Who starred as Captain Wilder in the 1980 NBC miniseries of The Martian Chronicles?

Richard Matheson wrote the script and Michael Anderson directed; Bradbury's verdict on the four-hour result was 'just boring'.

Bradbury's story 'There Will Come Soft Rains' takes its title from a poem by which writer?

Her 1918 poem was written during World War I and the Spanish flu; in the story an automated house recites it to a family that no longer exists.

In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', the automated house keeps announcing what date?

The house stands alone in Allendale, California, after a nuclear blast; a 1997 edition pushed all the Chronicles' dates forward 31 years.

Bradbury said he wrote 'There Will Come Soft Rains' after seeing a photograph of what?

He considered it the only story in The Martian Chronicles that was truly science fiction.

The Illustrated Man (1951) collects how many short stories within its tattooed frame narrative?

The vagrant's tattoos, supposedly inked by a time-travelling woman, come alive one by one to tell each tale.

Who starred in the 1969 film version of The Illustrated Man?

The film adapts only three of the stories: 'The Veldt', 'The Long Rain' and 'The Last Night of the World'.

In 'The Veldt', the Hadley children's virtual-reality nursery keeps showing which landscape?

The lions there are feasting on carcasses, and the parents eventually discover whose screams they have been hearing.

Under what title did 'The Veldt' first appear in The Saturday Evening Post?

The Hadleys' automated 'Happylife Home' even ties the family's shoes for them.

In 'A Sound of Thunder', a hunter travels back in time to shoot which animal?

Time Safari Inc. sends Eckels to the Mesozoic in 2055; he panics, steps off the path and crushes a butterfly.

'A Sound of Thunder' is often credited with inspiring the name of which chaos-theory idea?

When Eckels returns to 2055, the spelling on the signs has changed and the wrong candidate has won the presidential election.

'A Sound of Thunder' was first published in 1952 in which magazine?

It was later collected in The Golden Apples of the Sun in 1953.

Dandelion Wine is set during the summer of which year?

Critic Damon Knight grumbled that the period felt more like 'second-hand 1910' than genuine recollection.

Which unlikely magazine first published the short story 'Dandelion Wine' in 1953?

The 1957 novel grew from that story; a Moon crater was later named Dandelion by the Apollo 15 astronauts in its honour.

What is the title of Bradbury's official 2006 sequel to Dandelion Wine?

Together with Something Wicked This Way Comes, the two books make up what Bradbury called his Green Town Trilogy.

The title Something Wicked This Way Comes is a line from which Shakespeare play?

The witches speak it: 'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.'

Something Wicked This Way Comes began in 1955 as a proposed film for which Hollywood star to direct?

The movie never happened, so Bradbury turned the treatment into the 1962 novel about Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show.

What are the names of the two 13-year-old friends in Something Wicked This Way Comes?

The carnival arrives in Green Town on October 24, and its broken-looking carousel can age or rejuvenate whoever rides it.

Which director hired Bradbury in 1953 to write the screenplay for Moby Dick?

Bradbury spent months in Ireland working with Huston on the script, an experience he later fictionalised.

Bradbury's Irish adventures while writing Moby Dick became which 1992 book?

The exterior scenes set in New Bedford, Massachusetts, were actually filmed in Ireland.

Which 1953 film, developed from Bradbury's treatment 'Atomic Monster', first brought his work to cinemas?

Over the next half-century more than 35 features, shorts and TV movies were based on his stories or screenplays.

Bradbury won an Emmy in 1994 for the screenplay of which animated film he also narrated?

It was based on his 1972 novel of the same name.

How many episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater were there, every one written by Bradbury himself?

The anthology ran on HBO and then USA Network from 1985 to 1992, adapting stories such as 'A Sound of Thunder' and 'The Veldt'.

Which Bradbury story was adapted as the 100th episode of The Twilight Zone?

It was the only Bradbury script the series produced; his friendship with Rod Serling was famously strained.

Which famous writer, then a Mademoiselle editorial assistant, pulled Bradbury's 'Homecoming' from the slush pile?

Weird Tales had rejected the story; Charles Addams illustrated it, and its Elliott family bore a strong resemblance to his Addams Family.

Bradbury's first published story, 'Hollerbochen's Dilemma', appeared in 1938 in a fanzine edited by whom?

Ackerman and his girlfriend later paid the 19-year-old's way to the first World Science Fiction Convention in New York.

Which two writers did Bradbury name as his primary science-fiction influences?

As a boy he loved Burroughs so much that at 12 he wrote his own sequel to The Warlord of Mars.

Which everyday skill did Bradbury famously never acquire, relying on buses and his bicycle instead?

The man who imagined rockets to Mars never held a driver's licence.

Bradbury helped create the original exhibit inside which Walt Disney World attraction?

The Epcot geosphere's ride through the history of communication carried his narrative fingerprints.

In 2012 NASA named the landing site of which Mars rover 'Bradbury Landing'?

The rover touched down weeks after his death; an asteroid, 9766 Bradbury, had already carried his name since 1992.

What honour did the Pulitzer Prize jury give Bradbury in 2007?

It praised his 'distinguished, prolific, and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy'.

Which president presented Bradbury with the National Medal of Arts?

The ceremony came two years after his 2002 star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

What inscription did Bradbury choose for his headstone at Westwood Village Memorial Park?

He died in Los Angeles on June 5, 2012, aged 91, after a lengthy illness.

At what age did Bradbury marry Marguerite McClure, having lived in his parents' home until then?

They married in 1947 and stayed together until her death in 2003.

Which small Wisconsin press published Bradbury's first collection, Dark Carnival, in 1947?

Reviewer Will Cuppy predicted the young writer would reach the caliber of British fantasist John Collier.

Why was Bradbury rejected for military service during World War II?

The rejection left him free to start writing full time, publishing science-fiction stories in fanzines from 1938.

In 1971 the Apollo 15 astronauts named a lunar crater in honour of which Bradbury novel?

They called the crater Dandelion; an asteroid discovered in 1992 was later named 9766 Bradbury.

Where did Bradbury will his personal book collection after his death in 2012?

He died in Los Angeles at 91; as a boy he had spent countless hours reading Wells, Verne and Poe in Waukegan's Carnegie Library.

What is the first name of Montag, the fireman at the centre of Fahrenheit 451?

He starts the novel loyal to the firemen and ends it on the run, having memorised fragments of the very books he once burned.

Early in Fahrenheit 451, Montag comes home to find his wife Mildred has overdosed on what?

Two technicians pump her stomach and replace her blood, then leave to handle another overdose the same night.

Which poem does Montag read aloud to his wife's friends, driving them out of the house?

Matthew Arnold's melancholy lines appal the guests, and Mildred reports her husband to the firemen soon after.

Two hundred signed copies of the 1953 Fahrenheit 451 hardcover were bound in what material?

The same first edition also bundled two short stories, 'The Playground' and 'And the Rock Cried Out', that later printings dropped.

What was the censored schools version of Fahrenheit 451, sold from 1967 to 1979, called?

The publisher quietly cut 'hell', 'damn' and 'abortion' and altered 75 passages of a novel about censorship; Bradbury only found out in 1979 and had the original restored.

Bradbury sued over a 1957 Playhouse 90 drama that fused his novel with which other dystopia?

'A Sound of Different Drummers' aired on CBS; Bradbury's case only succeeded on appeal.

Bradbury recommended which composer for the 1966 film of Fahrenheit 451?

Bradbury had just met him on the set of Hitchcock's Torn Curtain; the score uses only strings, harp and tuned percussion, and he refused to write a title song.

Bradbury co-wrote a 1984 Fahrenheit 451 text-adventure game released by which software company?

The game is a sequel set five years after the novel, with Montag breaking into the New York Public Library; Bradbury wrote the prologue and the lines of a computer named 'Ray'.

What condition did Bradbury attach when he finally allowed a Fahrenheit 451 e-book in 2011?

A year earlier he had declared 'We have too many internets'; the title remains the only Simon & Schuster book with that library deal.

Bradbury wanted which documentary-maker to rename his 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11?

Bradbury insisted his objection was not political and wanted none of the film's money; the director phoned two weeks before release to say it was too late to change.

What 1949 incident inspired 'The Pedestrian', the story that fed into Fahrenheit 451?

Asked what he was doing, Bradbury replied 'putting one foot in front of the other', which the officers did not find funny.

Who is the writer picked up by an empty robotic police car in 'The Pedestrian'?

His home address in the story is the address of the house Bradbury grew up in, and the car is the only police unit left in a city of three million.

In The Martian Chronicles, what Earth disease wipes out almost all of the Martians?

The Fourth Expedition finds a dead world, and crewman Jeff Spender turns on his shipmates to keep more humans from spoiling it.

Which Doubleday editor paid $750 for the overnight outline that became The Martian Chronicles?

No relation to the author, he also supplied the title; Bradbury typed the outline through the night in a 50-cent YMCA room in New York.

Who wrote the foreword to Crónicas Marcianas, the Argentine edition of The Martian Chronicles?

The Spanish-language edition came out in Argentina at the same time as the American first edition, with every chapter intact.

At the end of 'The Million-Year Picnic', where does the father show his sons the Martians?

The family has fled a dying Earth under the pretence of a fishing trip, and the father burns government bonds to mark the end of the old way of life.

In 'Usher II', which Poe character's fate befalls Garrett, the investigator of Moral Climates?

Stendahl's robot-filled house on Mars avenges a 1975 book burning by dispatching guests with set-pieces from 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and 'The Premature Burial'.

Bradbury's 1985 mystery Death Is a Lonely Business is set in which seaside LA district?

Bradbury lived there from 1942 to 1950, and the unnamed narrator is a version of himself just before his marriage and his first success.

The title The Golden Apples of the Sun comes from 'The Song of Wandering Aengus' by which poet?

Bradbury said his wife Maggie introduced him to Romantic poetry while they were dating, and the line became a metaphor for a rocket scooping a cupful of fire from the sun.

Under what title did 'The Fog Horn' first appear in The Saturday Evening Post in 1951?

A monster movie already in production bought the story to use the name, so Bradbury retitled his tale; he said the idea came from a demolished roller coaster that looked like a dinosaur skeleton.

In 'All Summer in a Day', how often does the sun appear on rain-soaked Venus?

A 1982 PBS WonderWorks adaptation stretched the gap to nine years and softened the ending with a gift of flowers.

In 'All Summer in a Day', what is the name of the girl the other children lock in a closet?

She is the only child who remembers the sun from Earth, describing it as 'a penny' and 'fire in the stove', which is exactly why her classmates resent her.

Bradbury's story 'The Rocket Man' inspired a 1972 hit single by which musician?

Bradbury's tale of an astronaut father torn between his family and space was collected in The Illustrated Man in 1951.

In 'The Long Rain', crash survivors on Venus trek toward what kind of shelter?

After a month of walking they find they have circled back to the wreck; the story first ran in 1950 under the blunter title 'Death-by-Rain'.

In 'Marionettes, Inc.', Braling secretly uses a robot double of himself to get away from whom?

The scheme backfires when Braling Two falls for her and locks the original in a box; the story was adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents as 'Design for Loving'.

In 'Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed', what slowly happens to the Bittering family on Mars?

The father holds out by eating only Earth food until it runs out; the story first appeared in 1949 as 'The Naming of Names'.

Who played Mr. Dark in Disney's 1983 film of Something Wicked This Way Comes?

Bradbury's first choices were O'Toole and Lee, but Disney picked a then little-known actor to keep costs down; he earned a Saturn nomination anyway.

Whose score for the 1983 Something Wicked This Way Comes film was replaced by James Horner's?

Disney judged the original music 'aggressively sinister', spent $4 million on reshoots and re-edits, and delayed the film five months; the rejected score was finally released in 2015.

Bradbury's 1972 novel about Mr. Moundshroud began as a 1967 screenplay for which animator?

The film never got made; Bradbury finally wrote and narrated a Hanna-Barbera version in 1993, and a 2005 edition printed both screenplays.

Which Hollywood veteran starred in the 1972 ABC TV movie of Bradbury's 'The Screaming Woman'?

She plays a former mental patient nobody believes when she hears a woman buried alive on her estate; it was John Williams's last score for a TV movie.

Who was best man at Bradbury's 1947 wedding to Maggie McClure?

The two met at 18 over a shared love of King Kong, and stayed in touch at least monthly for more than 70 years; Bradbury later wrote a story about a stop-motion animator who strongly resembled him.

Leigh Brackett left Bradbury to finish which 1946 novella when she went to write The Big Sleep?

Bradbury finished the Planet Stories tale about the thief Hugh Starke, and the two shared the byline; he was also best man at Brackett's wedding that December.

Bradbury said he 'graduated' at 28 from what, after going three days a week for ten years?

He never attended college, calling it 'a very bad place for writers', and spent his later years raising money to keep California branches open.

Which Star Trek creator asked Bradbury to write for the show and stayed a friend for 30 years?

Bradbury said he 'never had the ability to adapt other people's ideas into any sensible form'.

How many daughters did Bradbury and his wife Maggie have?

Susan, Ramona, Bettina and Alexandra; Maggie was the only woman he ever dated.

Which Groucho Marx quiz show did Bradbury appear on in 1956?

In his on-air banter with Groucho he summarised 'The Veldt', which had run in The Saturday Evening Post six years earlier.

Which Tales from the Crypt publisher plagiarised Bradbury until a polite letter got him paid?

Between 1950 and 1954 Al Feldstein adapted 31 of his stories; two of them had been silently merged into a single tale called 'Home to Stay'.

Bradbury traced his writing habit partly to seeing Lon Chaney, at age three, in which 1923 film?

His mother took him; the other formative moment was a carnival performer's electrified sword nine years later.

Which architect bought Bradbury's Cheviot Hills home of 50 years and demolished it in 2015?

The house at 10265 Cheviot Drive is gone, but his home office was moved and rebuilt at the Ray Bradbury Center in Indianapolis.

Bradbury wrote the Orson Welles narration for which 1961 biblical epic?

He also drafted a new ending in which the risen Jesus leaves footprints that fill with blowing dust, but it was judged too expensive to shoot.