He left Waukegan at age 13, when his family westered to sunny Southern California, and though the starstruck boy loved Los Angeles (W.C. A great-grandfather was mayor of Waukegan in the 1880s, and the author’s creative memory was carved by the ravines of his native city, as Sam Weller emphasizes in his fine biography The Bradbury Chronicles (2005). I’ll wager that her descendant hopes she really was a witch.īradbury’s people were among his hometown’s earliest settlers. Johnson once described Bradbury as having “one foot amid the tree-lined streets of Green Town, Illinois in the 1920s and ’30s, and the other foot planted on the red sands of Mars in the not-too-distant future.” He is a pastoral moralist who jokes that he eats metaphor for breakfast, lunch, and dinner his line of descent has little to do with Jules Verne or Robert Heinlein and instead can be traced to the Nathaniel Hawthorne of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “Young Goodman Brown.” Like Hawthorne, he has Salem connections: in 1692, Mary Bradbury was convicted of witchcraft, though she escaped hanging. If ever a science fiction writer has deserved the honorable tag of “regionalist,” it is Ray Bradbury of Waukegan, Illinois.Ĭritic Wayne L.
Why? Via First Principles…Įvery summer solstice my daughter Gretel and I sit on the front porch and read the opening chapters of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (1957), the finest evocation of a boyhood summer I have read. In preparation, today I checked out of the library Dandelion Wine. The Muckdogs’ home opener is next Friday, and two days later the sun makes the season official. BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY-“Here comes the summer!” as the Undertones rejoiced.
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