Ray Bradbury and the fever of inspiration

In my early teens, I read Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes , a novel that combines fantasy and horror as two 13-year-old boys and one of their fathers confront evil, and prevail over it. I remember devouring the book in one sitting. It terrified and inspired me in equal measures. It changed me. Bradbury, who has died at age 91 , inspired and changed many people. There are few 20th-century authors whose work will be meaningful a century from now, but he will be among them. Everyone who became a fan of Bradbury's writing has a favorite novel or short story, but he is probably best known for Fahrenheit 451 , a dystopian novel of a world where books are banned. Published in 1953, at the height of America's cold war paranoia, the novel was a prescient warning about censorship and the way television was carving away the public's time in trivial ways. His Martian Chronicles – a collection of short stories with a common theme – were a warning about humanity's often terrible, but sometimes noble tendencies. We have learned that the Mars he imagined, where a civilization had created great canals, was pure fantasy, but that doesn't in the least change the power of his vision. Not everything Bradbury wrote had a political subtext. Always, his work was about people and how they dealt with life and the unexpected. Dandelion Wine is a paean to the value and values of small-town life, and I suspect if I'd read it before Something Wicked, I'd have a slightly different overall outlook. Bradbury, like his peers at the pinnacle of speculative fiction in the middle of the 20th century, endured a casual disdain from the literary lions and most critics. They considered science fiction and fantasy lesser forms of fiction. Today, of course, the field is entirely respectable – to write and especially to read. Over the years, I learned more about Bradbury the man, not just his writing. He had a prodigious work ethic, always trying to write 1,000 words a day, a standard I've only come close to meeting when working to finish books of my own. He loved libraries – "I never went to college, so I went to the library", he told the Associated Press – and tried to protect them from the encroachments of short-sighted budgeting and the shallowness of TV. Being human, Bradbury could disappoint. He was furious when Michael Moore, maker of leftwing political films, called one of them Fahrenheit 9/11 . Bradbury rather ludicrously claimed that this was a form of theft, and that Moore had no right to use this title. Bradbury wasn't only scornful of TV. He considered the internet a cultural sinkhole, telling the New York Times ( in an article mostly about his efforts to help save a financially threatened local library in California) in 2009: "The internet is a big distraction." He said he told Yahoo, which he said had asked to put one of his books online: "To hell with you and to hell with the internet". But we don't, or at least shouldn't, measure lives by the occasional mistakes. Only last week, the New Yorker magazine published a brief, lovely essay by Bradbury. He recalled his childhood discovery of fantasy and science fiction, adventures that primed his future. "I think I went a trifle mad that autumn. It's the only way to describe the intensity with which I devoured the stories. You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion." I came down with a fever the day I read Something Wicked This Way Comes. Thank you, Ray Bradbury. You changed me, and I am grateful.