Last modified: Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Director of IUPUI Center for Ray Bradbury Studies remembers late author for style, emotional intensity
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 6, 2012
INDIANAPOLIS -- The director of the nation's first center for the study of Ray Bradbury said the author will be remembered for the richly poetic style and emotional intensity of his best stories.
Bradbury, 91, the fantasy and science fiction author behind such classics as "Fahrenheit 451," died June 5 in Los Angeles.
Bradbury's early stories formed the basis for such enduring works as "The Martian Chronicles" (1950), "Dandelion Wine" (1957) and "Something Wicked This Way Comes" (1962), and such perennially popular story collections as "The Illustrated Man" (1951) and "The October Country" (1955), said Jonathan R. Eller, director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, a research unit within the Institute for American Thought in the School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
"In 1953, Bradbury's stories about the consequences of censorship and book burning culminated in the publication of 'Fahrenheit 451,' a novel that has come to symbolize the importance of literature and the imagination for generations of readers worldwide," Eller said.
The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies opened in 2007 with the goal of providing an archive for Bradbury's writings and a library of related reference books in the fields of fantasy and science fiction.
The center, in partnership with Kent State University Press, has established an annual journal, The New Ray Bradbury Review, with its third volume of Bradbury's notes, sketches and drafts due for release this fall; and a Modern Language Association-approved critical edition, The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury. The first volume in this series, covering 1938 to 1943, appeared in April 2011.
Eller is the author of "Becoming Ray Bradbury," the authoritative biography of Bradbury's early years. He can be reached at 317-274-1451 or jeller@iupui.edu.
