Publisher Description
Iconic author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury believed that, someday, a collection of his letters could illuminate the story of his life in new ways. That story emerges across time and memory from 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 an 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 intolerance that motivated some of his best writing, and the friends 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 originally intended for an audience of one.
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About the Authors
Ray Bradbury (1920–2012), one of the most popular science fiction writers in the world, wrote more than five hundred short stories, novels, plays, and poems. He won many awards, including the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the PEN Center USA West Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2000, he was the recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
About the Narrators
Byron Wagner is an audiobook narrator and voiceover artist based in Los Angeles. He began his career in entertainment at age eight, performing as a magician and ventriloquist for children’s parties, then graduated to theater, radio, TV, and film. After living in the UK for several years, his continuing love of acting and reading have happily led him back to the other side of the studio glass, doing voice acting and narrating, directing, and producing audiobooks.
Dan Bittner is an actor and voice talent and winner of several AudioFile Earphones Awards for audio narration. He has starred on stage and on the screen, in movies such as Men in Black, Adventureland, and the Producers: The Movie Musical. He has also appeared onstage as Macbeth and Sherlock Holmes in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Fred Sanders, an actor and Earphones Award–winning narrator, has received critics’ praise for his audio narrations that range from nonfiction, memoir, and fiction to mystery and suspense. He been seen on Broadway in The Buddy Holly Story, in national tours for Driving Miss Daisy and Big River, and on such television shows as Seinfeld, The West Wing, Will and Grace, Numb3rs,Titus, and Malcolm in the Middle. His films include Sea of Love, The Shadow, and the Oscar-nominated short Culture. He is a native New Yorker and Yale graduate.
Jacques Roy is a audio narrator and actor, known for The Lower Angels and Room and Board.
Eunice Wong is a classically trained actor who works extensively in professional theaters across the United States and in New York City, as well as having appeared on HBO, NBC, ABC, Comedy Central, and in various independent films. Eunice is a graduate of the Juilliard School Drama Division Actor Training Program and has also studied piano and singing at the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto. A first-generation Chinese Canadian, born in Toronto to Eric and Eleanor Wong, who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong, Eunice grew up with her brother Eugene in Toronto and thanks her family for their constant love and support.
James Langton, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and later as a musician at the Guildhall School in London. He has worked in radio, film, and television, also appearing in theater in England and on Broadway. He is also a professional musician who led the internationally renowned Pasadena Roof Orchestra from 1996 to 2002.