Bradbury news

Sam Weller, Bradbury's biographer, was quoted recently as saying that Bradbury is the most important writer of the last one hundred years. I'm not going to argue with that. Full details can be found in this report from the Lake County News-Sun, the newspaper that serves Waukegan, Illinois and the surrounding areas.

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There's been a video of a 2001 Bradbury lecture on YouTube for a very long time, but just lately I've seen dozens of new places linking to it - as if it were a new lecture or a new find.  I'm not going to re-link to it directly, but I will link to two web pages which have condensed some of Bradbury's content. Here you will find, derived from the lecture, Bradbury's twelve pieces of advice to young writers. And here, Bradbury's recommended reading. I confess to having read just a few of the authors he mentions (Collier, Welty and Wharton, since you asked).

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From Monsters from the Vault magazine, a bit of free reading: Terry Pace's article entitled "Ray Bradbury's Earliest Influences" discusses Bradbury's early childhood experiences watching Lon Chaney.

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Bradbury on Stage, Audies

Terry Pace does a good job in keeping Ray Bradbury's theatre, film and TV work in the public eye. His Pillar of Fire theatre group has a Facebook page, and is also profiled in this report (and YouTube video) on the Left In Alabama website.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports on another stage production of Fahrenheit 451... with a contemporary political viewpoint.



Nominations have been published for the 2011Audie Awards - given for excellence in spoken word production by the Audio Producers of America. Among the nominees in the short story collection category is Bradbury's Long After Midnight, narrated by Michael Prichard. See the full list of nominees here.

Darkness

I'm currently reading around the edges of Fahrenheit 451, as part of a study of both Bradbury's work and Francois Truffaut's 1966 film adaptation.

I just finished Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon, which is a fascinating inside look at post-revolutionary Russia - although Koestler, writing in 1940, carefully avoids specifying any of the countries where the events of the novel take place. I found the novel quite chilling and atmospheric, but was constantly reminded of George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) AND Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). I understand that Orwell was familiar with Koestler's work, and even wrote an essay about him. I will have to track this down.

Immediately after finishing the novel, I moved on to Sidney Kingsley's 1951 play based on Koestler's novel. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the hardcover edition of the play includes photographs from the original Broadway production. The original cast of the play included Claude Rains (in the lead role as Rubashov), and Kim Hunter.

All of which brings me back to Bradbury. We know that Bradbury knew Koestler's novel and that he saw Kingsley's play. In fact, he was once quoted as saying that he thought Koestler captured aspects of totalitarianism more accurately than did either Orwell or Aldous Huxley.

Bradbury was also an admirer of Claude Rains, although the only professional connection between them (that I can think of) is the Alfred Hitchcock Presents adaptation of Bradbury's "And So Died Riabouchinska". Bradbury's admiration of Rains is referred to in this account of Terry Pace's 2009 production Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice.