ubtitled "A Journey to Far Metaphor," on the basis of metaphor being Bradbury's default mode, this sumptuous coffee-table volume features hundreds of color illustrations and photos as well as generous amounts of text, all chronicling the long, impactful career of one of America's most beloved fantasists. The compiler and arranger of this volume has been friends with Bradbury since 1968, and is currently Sotheby's expert on material related to comics, SF and fantasy. Additionally, the man in charge of the official Bradbury archives, artist Donn Albright, has assisted with materials and advice. And of course, Bradbury himself has contributed immensely to this authorized project, including the writing of a small essay.
Chapter 1 is titled "Early Life, Early Fandom." After a very brief foray into Bradbury's juvenile years, we find the writer as a teen in Los Angeles, avidly reading newspaper comic strips and attending every movie he can manage to attend, based on his income from selling newspapers. Soon Bradbury falls in with the flourishing L.A. fandom scene, becoming friends with Forry Ackerman and Hannes Bok, among others. Travel to the first World Science Fiction Convention in New York City in 1939 cements his ambition. As he enters young manhood, his fan fictions gradually mature into selling works. This brings us to Chapter 2, "From Pulps to Slicks," where we watch Bradbury establish a toehold in the professional world. First with Weird Tales and other pulps (including some early mystery work), and then on to his breakout years, when bigtime 'zines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Playboy clamored for his work.
Bradbury's leap into a more permanent medium is covered in Chapter 3, "To Hardcovers and Paperbacks." Here we see early support from editor August Derleth at Arkham House, as well as the start of Bradbury's ongoing collaboration with his favorite cover artist, Joseph Mugnaini. Ever eager to break into new territory, Bradbury next moved into comics, as we learn in Chapter 4, "EC Comics and Ray Bradbury: The Untold Story." A trove of correspondence between EC editor Bill Gaines and Bradbury is brought to light.
"The Modern Renaissance Man: Bradbury on Radio and Television, and in the Movies" constitutes Chapter 5, which explores the many non-print versions of Bradbury's stories. Here we are treated to the shooting diary of director François Truffaut, who brought Fahrenheit 451 to the screen. Always a fan of live drama, Bradbury has scripted numerous plays and seen many adaptations by other hands of his work for the boards, and this aspect of his life is covered in Chapter 6, "The Theater and Ray Bradbury: From Private Passions to Public Performances." A short chapter, "Drawing Metaphors: The Art of Ray Bradbury" concerns the amateur paintings and sketches of the writer. Rounding out the book is Chapter 8, "Bradbury at the Millennium: Poetry, Later Books and Marginalia."
The Martian chronicler's 80-year picnic
Until we are privileged to receive a full-length text biography of Raymond Douglas Bradbury, this affectionate, wide-ranging, mostly visual volume will have to keep us Bradbury fanatics happy. And indeed it does, with its lavish offerings of definitive and surprising pictures milestoning Bradbury's public life. But while Jerry Weist's text is informed and accurate, it simply cannot cover all the topics in which we might be interested. For instance, Bradbury's quintessentially Midwestern childhood, so crucial to the formation of his character and art, is missing almost entirely from this volume. We do learn about his Aunt Neva, so influential on the 5-year-old budding reader. But the landscape and customs of that vanished 1920s Illinois are entirely absent. We also learn nothing of Bradbury's family life, without even a picture of his wife to grace the pages. Nor are his many awards summarized, nor the varying critical reception to his works recounted. (One trivial but jarring omission: Weist tantalizes us by saying early on that Picasso himself had occasion to illustrate Bradbury's fiction, yet never reveals the circumstances of such a mythical drawing or painting by the Spanish master.)
No matter, though. It's fruitless to criticize this book for not achieving what it never set out to achieve. What Weist wanted to accomplish, he has indeed accomplished. He wanted to limn the outlines of Bradbury's character and literary productions in a tribute seductive to the eye, and that's what he's done. He's found and reproduced items the average reader has only heard about, such as Bradbury's early fanzine illos and youthful photos of the bright-eyed fan. He's charted the two-way interaction between Bradbury, a very visual writer, with the numerous artists who have been inspired by his stories, most notably Mugnaini. He's solicited testimonials from old Bradbury peers such as Ackerman and Robert Madle. And he's added such thoughtful flourishes as the photographs of Bradbury's aged hands cradling various nostalgic items which open each chapter. And all of this has been wonderfully arrayed with graphic genius in bright colors on the page.
Weist makes a point of how Bradbury's life has embodied the entire history of 20th-century pop culture. While I would qualify this slightly—popular music plays a lesser part in Bradbury's oeuvre than it has in the century—I have to agree that to chart Bradbury's influences and loves is to map the best of Western popular art. Rather as, according to recent biographies, Bing Crosby and Dean Martin were both seminal and archetypical in and beyond their domains, so does this book prove that Bradbury's wide-ranging success results from his having intuitively tapped into the throbbing core of what made American artforms so stimulating over the past hundred years.
