Ray Bradbury, Author Of Martian Chronicles And Fahrenheit 451, Dies At 91

Renowned American sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury has died aged 91 in Los Angeles. The author of Fahrenheit 451 and other classics of science fiction passed away on Tuesday night, his family and his biographer have confirmed.

On Wednesday Alexandra Bradbury, one of his four daughters, said that her father had passed away the previous night.

Reports say he had chosen to be buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery with a headstone that reads “Author of Fahrenheit 451.”

The author had been plagued by health problems for quite some time. Bradbury spent his last years in a wheelchair after suffering a stroke. Yet reports say that despite the setbacks, Bradbury remained creative well into his 90s, writing every day. He continued producing new works and participated in literary events and fundraisers around Los Angeles.

“The great thing about my life is that everything I’ve done is a result of what I was when I was 12 or 13,” the praised author said in 1982.

Ray Bradbury was among the most celebrated American writers of speculative fiction in the 20th and 21st century. Many of Bradbury’s works were adapted for the screen.

Bradbury emerged on the literary scene in 1950 with The Martian Chronicles, unveiling stories of extraterrestrial colonizers who break into an idyllic Martian civilization and destroy it. The Martian Chronicles was translated into over 30 languages, adapted for TV and prompted a computer game.

Bradbury’s most famous book, Fahrenheit 451, has quite a story of its own. The writer created his masterpiece in only nine days at the UCLA library, as he had no typing machine of his own. He paid 20 cents per hour of typing and completed the book at a cost of $9.80.

One of Bradbury’s significant achievements is that he made the literary community respect him as he was – a science fiction writer.

Bradbury scooped numerous literary and cinema awards over his seven-decade-long career. Among them an Emmy Award for the screenplay of The Halloween Tree, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6644 Hollywood Boulevard, the National Medal of Arts, presented to the writer by then President George W. Bush, and a 2007 Pulitzer Prize “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.” Bradbury was also nominated for the Academy Award for an animated film, “Icarus Montgolfier Wright.”

“Everything I’ve done is a surprise, a wonderful surprise. I sometimes get up at night when I can’t sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, `My God, did I write that? Did I write that?’, because it’s still a surprise,” Bradbury said in 2000.

His works included The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes and many more.

­”His legacy lives on in his monumental body of books, film, television and theater, but more importantly, in the minds and hearts of anyone who read him, because to read him was to know him. He was the biggest kid I know,” Bradbury’s grandson, Danny Karapetian commented about his grandfather’s passing to io9, a daily publication on science fiction.