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Ray Bradbury Dies at 91

Ray Bradbury, the writer whose expansive flights of fantasy and vividly rendered spacescapes have provided the world with one of the most enduring speculative blueprints for the future, has died.

Ray Bradbury, the iconic writer whose expansive flights of fantasy and vividly rendered space-scapes have provided the world with one of the most enduring speculative blueprints for the future, has died.He was 91.

Bradbury died Tuesday night, according to his daughter, Alexandra Bradbury, the Associated Press reports. No other details were immediately available. 

Author of more than 27 novels and story collections—most famously The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes—and more than 600 short stories, Bradbury has frequently been credited with elevating the often-maligned reputation of science fiction, singlehandedly helping to move the genre into the realm of literature.

Starting with the Jack Arnold-directed It Came From Outer Space, about the crash-landing of a mysterious craft in the Arizona desert, in 1953, Bradbury's work has formed the basis of numerous films.

Rod Steiger starred in a 1969 adaptation of his futuristic short-story collection The Illustrated Man. In 1983, Jason Robards took on Bradbury's horror novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, about a pair of teenage boys who experience nightmares when a carnival comes to town.

And in perhaps the most notable big-screen spin on Bradbury's work, French New Wave pioneer Francois Truffaut directed a version of Bradbury's dystopian book-burning classic Fahrenheit 451 in 1966.

Bradbury's stories and novels also yielded many television adaptations, with the author also writing and creating the cable series The Ray Bradbury Theater, a collection of standalone science-fiction and fantasy episodes that ran in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Jennifer Wolfe's picture

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.

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