The Letters of Ray Bradbury Reveal a Man Drinking In All That Life Had to Offer

A new collection includes the author’s correspondence with figures as diverse as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Russell Kirk, Federico Fellini and Bertrand Russell.

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Ray Bradbury in 1978

Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images

Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury, Jonathan R. Eller, ed., (Simon & Schuster, 509 pp., $35)

Throughout his long life (1920–2012), author Ray Bradbury absorbed everything around him. Deeply, it seems, and with unlimited and unbounded imagination. Everything became a part of him, and he allowed it all to penetrate and shape his entire being. As he notes in the letter just quoted, his influences were the high as well as the low, and the in-between, everything from his family to his comics collections.

Bradley J. Birzer

About the Author

Bradley J. Birzer

Bradley J. Birzer is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and the author of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2002) and Tolkien and the Inklings: Men of the West (forthcoming).

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