by Sam Weller
Many family members assisted in many ways. First and foremost, I must thank my father, William G. Weller, who introduced me to the works of Ray Bradbury long ago. Beyond this, he has been a constant pillar, willing to listen, to read manuscript pages, to offer knowledge on the art of storytelling, and to (very important) dog-sit as I traveled about the country. He has just been a great dad. To Barbara J. Weller, my beloved mother, who gently and unobtrusively introduced me to the wonders of reading, I hope this book makes you proud. I know you played a hand in the fate that led to it. Deepest thanks go to my sisters, Betsy Hetzler and Suzanne Smith, who gave me unwavering love and support, and my brother, Dr. David Weller. I depended on Dave’s indispensable wisdom and advice for this biography. And to their excellent spouses—Paul, Tim, and Sarah—I thank you. And, of course, a nod of appreciation goes to the kids: Abbey, Eian, Keaton, Elin, and Maggie. Thanks, too, to my mother-in-law, Tam Tran, who stepped in during the early days of parenthood and the late, taxing days of revisions; my brother-in-law, Tuan Nguyen, who has been singing my praises to librarians across the Lone Star State; and, of course, Tri, Tran, Ky-Tai, Sylvie, and Minh-Tan. A sincere thanks, as well, goes to my extended family in Illinois, Wisconsin, and to the Quan Le family in Texas. And to Disney and Sage, my best friends, I owe an eternal debt of love and gratitude for standing by me throughout.
And finally, to my wife, Jan Nguyen, who has stood by me throughout this fantastic voyage—a more loving and loyal partner does not exist. Jan assisted on every conceivable level and, in the end, delivered the miracle that is our baby girl, Mai-Linh Nguyen Weller. In the days that followed, in between a blur of changings and feedings, and in the throes of book revisions, Jan became my collaborator—implementing edits, reading the manuscript numerous times, and rewriting me. She very literally delivered two babies and, for this, I am forever in her debt. I love you.
P. S.
Insights, Interviews & More …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author and Ray Bradbury, November 30, 2009
Credit: Zen Sekizawa
Meet Sam Weller
SAM WELLER familiarized himself with the words of Ray Bradbury even before he was born. During the infamous Chicago blizzard of January 1967, as drifting blankets of snow created white-out conditions in the Windy City, William Weller, Sam’s father, read Bradbury’s seminal classic The Illustrated Man aloud to his pregnant wife, Barbara. The baby, nine months in utero, turned and listened with keen interest....
Flash forward to the present.
Sam Weller is the authorized biographer of one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century—Ray Bradbury, the poet laureate of the dark fantastic; the gatekeeper to “October Country”; the man who immortalized Green Town, Illinois, the planet Mars, and a dark dystopia where books are banished forever. The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury is the first-ever biography of Ray Bradbury, a creator and visionary who, more than any other author, altered the fabric of popular culture.
Sam Weller is the former Midwest correspondent for Publishers Weekly. He is a regular feature writer for the Chicago Tribune Magazine, as well as the Chicago Public Radio program 848. He is a frequent literary critic for the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He writes about punk rock for Punk Planet magazine and his essays have appeared on the National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He is a contributor to Playboy.com and a former staff writer for the alternative weekly Newcity, where he was given the Peter Lisagor Award—the highest honor in Chicago journalism. His short fiction has been published in Spec-Lit, an anthology of science fiction edited by the noted SF author Phyllis Eisenstein. Sam is a frequent lecturer on the life and works of Ray Bradbury, as well as on the writing process and getting published. In February 2004, he was the special guest of the Commonwealth Club in San Jose, California.
Sam Weller is a professor in the fiction department at Columbia College, Chicago. He lives in Chicago with his wife, baby daughter, and two dogs. He is at work on a graphic novel about truck drivers who save the universe, as well as a fictional suspense novel about the real-life Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
All’s Weller That Ends Weller
by Ray Bradbury
I’VE ALWAYS CONSIDERED that allowing someone to write one’s biography is an act of supreme egotism.
Commenting on the finished product seems to me to be even more outrageous. Nevertheless, I will try to weigh Sam Weller’s book and give you my prejudiced opinion.
If anything, the book seems to me to be an adjunct to my book Zen in the Art of Writing, which was published many years ago.
I can recommend it on this level because I see my younger self, as portrayed in Sam Weller’s book as the untalented youth who wanted to write stories, essays, poems, plays, or screenplays, but didn’t know how.
When you start with very little or nothing, the advancement you make over the years can be of some mild interest to other writers starting out on the road.
One way or another I was able to ignore my seeming lack of talent by doing two things that Weller writes about again and again: spending my life in the library from the end of one year to the other, and writing every single day of that year and the years to follow. I was so busy writing that there was no time to notice how inadequate was the result, and the library provided me with a haven where the talents of other writers caused me to believe, by some reflected glory, that perhaps one day I would achieve their talent. On these two levels I’m able to comment comfortably and without my ego getting in the way.
I must confess that I rather like my younger self because I wrapped my ignorance around myself and got my work done.
Over the years when people have asked if I was an optimist, I said and proved otherwise. In other words, I was an optimal behaviorist. Any writer coming to this biography will find that I behaved every day of my life as if I knew where I was going.
The lessons that can be learned from this book are simply that if you write for a single day, at the end of that day you’re pleased with the fact you wrote something. If you write every day for a week, you’re even more pleased. And at the end of a year if you can look back on 365 days of writing every single day, a feeling of optimism rewards you.
It has always been my belief that optimism comes from action, not from imagined things about yourself and the future.
One of several things I can point out in this book, and of which I am mildly proud, is the fact that I wrote for thousands of days, pretending not to notice that I was inside the skin of a mildly ignorant person, on his way somewhere, who was going to the library for the information that I needed to get there.
So as a preamble or sequel to my Zen in the Art of Writing, I cannot help but recommend Sam Weller’s patient recitation of my early days to show other young talents how to keep so busy that they won’t be able to recognize their failures or their inadequacies.
Beyond that, Weller’s discussion of the accomplishments and the rewards that came late in life is most pleasant, but nevertheless of no practical use to anyone planning a future of writing.
Sam Weller’s The Bradbury Chronicles is a handbook of days—my days—where progress was slow, but continuous. I can only stand back and recommend Weller himself and let him speak with no further comment from me.
A Passage to Somewhere
by Sam Weller
TO ME, good research is often written with invisible ink. You can’t see it, but it’s there. It’s only later, after reading an entire work that the apparition of all the inquiry begins to emerge and shimmer and rise to the surface. In writing The Bradbury Chronicles, I hoped to take nearly five years of fact-finding and to weave it well under the surface of a compelling, inspirational narrative—in this case, the fantastic life-voyage of Ray Douglas Bradbury.
Obviously, research is paramount to a credible
biography, and I was always committed to contributing to Bradbury scholarship. I am confident I have done so. But, in my opinion, nothing stops a biography faster than the eight-hundred-page doorstop written in the tweed-and-tobacco vernacular of dissertation babble. With this mission in mind, to emphasize research, but to integrate it into rich, gripping storytelling, my journey began in a mysterious, often dizzying realm—a graveyard of ghosts Ray Bradbury liked to call: “Somewhere.”
This notion of “somewhere” was a running joke between us. It began early in my research, when I would fly out every two or three weeks from my home in Chicago to visit Ray Bradbury at his home in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. We would spend mornings and early afternoons doing interviews. Then, Ray would take his requisite nap, a battery-charging ritual of sorts he has carried on throughout his life. During this time, I was free to explore the catacombs of the Bradbury house. I foraged through boxes, rifled filing cabinets, crept through cobwebs in the garage, and I rummaged deep through the vast laboratory of the imagination that is Ray Bradbury’s storied basement office. I remember the very first time my eyes zeroed in on a file cabinet with a drawer marked “Novels in Progress,” and another labeled “Short Stories in Progress.” The files were bursting. But discovering documents and manuscript pages and letters often led to more questions than it gave answers. When Ray would awake from his siesta, I would ask him if he knew where I could find a particular letter, or a contract, or a photograph.
He would always laugh and sigh. “Oh… it’s somewhere!”
Somewhere meant anywhere. Ray’s house was organized chaos, much to the dismay of Maggie, his beloved wife of fifty-six years. Often times Ray could perform a miracle and direct me straight toward what I was looking for. But more often than not, I was left to my own devices—like Howard Carter sifting Egyptian sands on the mighty quest for Tut.
And somewhere meant elsewhere. During my years working on The Bradbury Chronicles, Ray Bradbury’s birthplace of Waukegan, Illinois, very nearly became a second home. One January afternoon, temperatures in the single digits and my own body temperature nearing a flu-induced 103 degrees Fahrenheit, I prowled through snow-blanketed local graveyards hoping to piece together the enigma of the vast Bradbury family tree. I spent days in the deeps of Waukegan’s city hall, poring through records. I spent more time staring blurry-eyed into microfiche machines in the town library. Green Town is where Ray’s imagination was born, and it was essential for me to illustrate how it came to be.
My travels took me to New York for a who’s-counting-martini-lunch with Ray’s agent of seven decades, Don Congdon. In my travels, I found every house Ray Bradbury had ever lived in. Bradbury geeks rejoice! I interviewed Maggie Bradbury for hundreds of hours. And in the post–9/11 world, where government information is often restricted Fort Knox–style, I hounded the Federal Bureau of Investigation through a Freedom of Information Act request to divulge that, indeed, they had a file on Ray Bradbury and that agents had parked on his palm-tree-lined street in the late 1950s to watch him, assuming he was a communist sympathizer. I interviewed hundreds of people, collected an office brimming to the rafters with transcribed interviews, archival letters, manuscripts, contracts, diaries, and photographs. I charged myself with funneling it all into visual story. I wanted The Bradbury Chronicles to read like a movie. Gripping! Amazing! A thrilling wonder-story about a boy born into nothing who made something incredible out of his life. This was premier in my mind. For I believe that Ray Bradbury’s rich sense of storytelling was born, in large part, of his early love of the cinema. It all started on an ice-gusted day in February 1924 when Ray’s mother took her son to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney.
In the end, The Bradbury Chronicles is the biography of an immense imagination and the origin of ideas. And this is the question Ray Bradbury is asked most often. Where do you get your ides?
The answer, simply?
Ray will tell you. “Somewhere!”
Or, better yet, as you hold this book in your hands, the real solution will emerge. Where does Ray Bradbury get his ideas? The answer appears in ever-materializing research. Wait a bit longer. Wait. Wait. You see it? You will.
The answer is written in invisible ink. All you need to do is hold it up to the light.
READ ON
The Books That Shaped My Imagination
by Ray Bradbury
Buck Rogers, comic strips by writer Phil Nolan and artist Dick Calkins
For me, it all starts with a comic book. Buck Rogers came into the world in October 1929 at the start of the Great Depression. I began to collect it, and it plummeted me into the future. It changed my life. Ray Bradbury, born August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois: destined to travel to Mars and never return from that year on.
Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs
Male animals want to control the world. When you’re a nine-year-old boy, you’re still trying to find your way in the world and you’re just starting to learn about death. How can you conquer death? And Tarzan, this great masculine character, says, “I’ll tell you what, watch me. I’ll do it. And you do the same.”
The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
I could hardly wait for summer vacation because I would sit by the open door of our house and look out the screen and reread The Wizard of Oz. I would play all the parts. I was a budding actor.
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
God created me as a metaphoric stickum creature; any metaphor sticks to me. The stories of Poe are all metaphors: “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Wonderful stories.
The Invisible Man, H. G. Wells
In my teens, Wells understood my native-born paranoia. Boys of seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen are paranoid. All the novels of H. G. Wells are paranoid. The invisible man said, “If the world doesn’t behave, I will teach it to behave.” Young men are full of that. They try to control what can’t be controlled. By reading a good story by Wells, you can purge yourself of this.
Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth, Thomas Wolfe
Certain novelists open the gates of life to us. Wolfe says about life, “Look at that banquet out there. Fantastic, isn’t it? How are you going to eat it all?”
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
On my way back from New York, I went to Waukegan and bought a copy of The Grapes of Wrath at the United Cigar Store. I got on the Greyhound bus and I went west on the same Route 66 that the Okies took going to California. Can you imagine a better circumstance to read that book? I was out of my mind!
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
Finishing the book, I said to myself, “Someday I would like to write a novel set on the planet Mars, with similar people.” I immediately jotted down a list of the sorts of folks I would want to plant on Mars.
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
I went to see Moby Dick at a silent film theater. I came home and I had a copy of Moby-Dick in the living room and I said to my wife, Maggie, “I wonder how long it will be before I finally read this book.” A month later, John Huston said to me, “Read the book. I want you to write the screenplay for my adaptation.” I read it and immediately saw the metaphors. I went back the next day to John and said, “I’ll do it.”
Plays by George Bernard Shaw
I have always thought that George Bernard Shaw deserved to be the patron saint of the American theater. Avant-garde in 1900, he remains light years ahead of our entire avant-garde today.
And the Films …
by Ray Bradbury
Robin Hood (1922)
Douglas Fairbanks was the star of this picture and I was named for him when I was born. So many of these early favorite films all had the same theme—unrequited love. I must have made the connection at some secret level. Maybe I was preparing myself for a failed love affair.
The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
I saw it when I was fi
ve and there was an element in me that reacted to the metaphor. If his mask could have stayed on, perhaps the phantom could have had real love. The more I look at my life and all of the films that influenced me, there’s always the metaphor there.
The Lost World (1925)
The dinosaurs were instant loves. I knew that they had existed millions of years before and I was amazed at the size and the beauty of these things and the fact that they had been dead for millions of years and with all my heart and soul I wanted them to be alive again. And this movie provided me with a means to make them to be alive. Dinosaurs have been constant companions through all of my life.
The Black Pirate (1926)
This was Douglas Fairbanks again. It was one of the first Technicolor films and I saw it while I lived in Tucson in 1926. It had wonderful color. The tales of derring-do. The romantic adventures of people like pirates influenced me very much when I was quite young.
The Mysterious Island (1929)
Jules Verne was the master of metaphor either under the sea or on mysterious islands or visits to the moon or around the world in eighty days or traveling to center of the earth. The immense size and complexity of the metaphors shocked me.
The Skeleton Dance (1929)
When I was eight years old, they showed The Skeleton Dance by Walt Disney at the Genesee Theater in Waukegan and I was so enchanted with it that I stayed on and saw it at least three times. And they were running a terrible film, I believe with Adolphe Menjou, full of love and mush. I put up with it. I ran to the bathroom a lot and came back and saw The Skeleton Dance and realized that I had seen something that had changed my life. My father had to come to the theater that night to drag me out and to take me home. I didn’t want to leave.