His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended consequences. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter.

Although his formal education ended there, he became a ‘student of life,’ selling newspapers on L.A. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. “American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born Augin Waukegan, Illinois. Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth, widely believed to be one of the Grandmaster’s premier accomplishments: as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world.” More on Goodreads On Ray Bradbury Here living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets. The images, ideas, sounds and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful: the mournful cries of celestial travelers cast out cruelly into a vast, empty space of stars and blackness…the sight of gray dust selling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere…the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father’s clothing. Here are eighteen startling visions of humankind’s destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin – visions as keen as the tattooist’s needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body. “The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury – a collection of tales that breathe and move, animated by sharp, intaken breath and flexing muscle.

~Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man Plot summary “It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping in the eyes, an undertow at the ankles it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.”

The illustrated man the long rain