Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Becoming Ray Bradbury...and other stories

I hear from Jon Eller at the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies that he finished his book Becoming Ray Bradbury: 1920-1953 in June. It came in at 200,000 words, and is now going through final cuts, down to 150,000 words, as he finalises publication with the University of Illinois Press. The book is a largely biographical influence study of Bradbury's early life and career.

Jon is already at work on the sequel, The World of Ray Bradbury: 1953-1972, and has completed the first 40,000 words of that volume to date.

From previous discussions with Jon - and from preview chapters he kindly allowed me to see - I can report that these new volumes will complement both Sam Weller's 2005 biography of Bradbury, The Bradbury Chronicles, and Eller and Touponce's Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (2004).

As if he didn't have enough to do, Jon will be whiling away the winter months by finalising the contents for the second volume of the Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, which will cover the 1943-1944 period. The first volume is already with the publishers.

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