Bradbury1

	Ray Bradbury (1920 - )
	Ray Bradbury (1920 - ) calls himself "that special freak-the man with the child inside who remembers all." Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, and began writing when he was seven. Bradbury sees himself as a "magic realist" and as a disciple of Edgar Allan Poe. He says that his lifelong hatred of thought control grows out of his sympathy for his ancestor Mary Bradbury, who was tried as a witch in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Here is how his imagination grew: "When I was three my mother snuck me in and out of movies two or three times a week. My first film was Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I suffered permanent curvature of the spine and of my imagination that day a long time ago in 1923. From that hour on, I knew a kindred and wonderfully grotesque compatriot of the dark when I saw one.... I was in love, then, with monsters and skeletons and circuses and carnivals and dinosaurs and at last, the red planet, Mars.
From these primitive bricks I have built a life and a career. By my staying in love with all if these amazing things, all of the good things in my existence have come about. In other words, I was not embarrassed at circuses. Some people are. Circuses are loud, vulgar and smell in the sun. By the time many people are fourteen or fifteen, they have been divested of their loves, their ancient and intuitive tastes, one by one, until when they reach maturity there is no fun left, no zest, no gusto, no flavor. Others have criticized, and they have criticized themselves, into embarrassment. When the circus pulls in at five of a dark cold summer morn, and the calliope sounds, they do not rise and run, they turn in their sleep, and life passes by. I did rise and run..."
Open "Elements of Literature, Fourth Course" to Page 173 and read "The Pedestrian"