Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920, and the town of his childhood reappears throughout his fiction as Green Town. He came up through short stories: his first collection, Dark Carnival, was published by Arkham House in 1947, and his early reputation rests on two story books, The Martian Chronicles (1950), about the exploration and settlement of Mars by Americans leaving a troubled Earth, and The Illustrated Man (1951), 18 stories that set the cold mechanics of technology against human psychology.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), set in a future America where firemen burn any books they find, grew out of a 1951 novella called 'The Fireman' that he typed on a rented typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library. Bradbury also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s hosted The Ray Bradbury Theater, an anthology series based on his stories. He died in Los Angeles in June 2012, at 91.

Start with The Martian Chronicles rather than Fahrenheit 451. Fahrenheit 451 is the famous one and worth reading, but his career was built on short fiction, and The Martian Chronicles shows his range better: linked stories that follow Mars from the first expeditions through settlement. Read Fahrenheit 451 second.

After that, choose by mood. The Illustrated Man gives more science fiction; Dandelion Wine (1957), a novel set in Green Town in the summer of 1928, shows his nostalgic side. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), in which two 13-year-old friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, face a traveling carnival that arrives in Green Town in late October, is the best entry point to his dark fantasy.