page_title: Ray Bradbury
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Ray Bradbury / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Headstone of Ray Bradbury at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, Los Angeles, CA, USA As Bradbury was still alive at that time, the stone marked his designated burial place. Bradbury died on June 5, 2012.
context_page_description: Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres including fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery fiction.
  Bradbury was mainly known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 and his science fiction and horror story collections The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and I Sing the Body Electric!. Most of his best known work is in fantasy fiction, but he also wrote in other genres, such as the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale. He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film as well as comic books.
  The New York Times called Bradbury "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".
context_section_description: Bradbury's wife was Marguerite McClure (January 16, 1922 – November 24, 2003) from 1947 until her death; they had four daughters: Susan, Ramona, Bettina and Alexandra. Bradbury never obtained a driver's license, but relied on public transportation or his bicycle. He lived at home until he was 27 and married. His wife of 56 years, Maggie, as she was affectionately called, was the only woman Bradbury ever dated.
  He was raised Baptist by his parents, who were themselves infrequent churchgoers. As an adult, Bradbury considered himself a "delicatessen religionist" who resisted categorization of his beliefs and took guidance from both Eastern and Western faiths. He felt that his career was "a God-given thing, and I'm so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is 'At play in the fields of the Lord.'"
  Bradbury was a close friend of Charles Addams, and Addams illustrated the first of Bradbury's stories about the Elliotts, a family that resembled Addams' own Addams Family placed in rural Illinois. Bradbury's first story about them was "Homecoming", published in the 1946 Halloween issue of Mademoiselle, with Addams' illustrations. Addams and he planned a larger collaborative work that would tell the family's complete history, but it never materialized, and according to a 2001 interview, they went their separate ways. In October 2001, Bradbury published all the Family stories he had written in one book with a connecting narrative, From the Dust Returned, featuring a wraparound Addams cover of the original "Homecoming" illustration.
  Another close friend was animator Ray Harryhausen, who was best man at Bradbury's wedding. During a BAFTA 2010 awards tribute in honor of Ray Harryhausen's 90th birthday, Bradbury spoke of his first meeting Harryhausen at Forrest J Ackerman's house when they were both 18 years old. Their shared love for science fiction, King Kong, and the King Vidor-directed film The Fountainhead, written by Ayn Rand, was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. These early influences inspired the pair to believe in themselves and affirm their career choices. After their first meeting, they kept in touch at least once a month, in a friendship that spanned over 70 years.
  Late in life, Bradbury retained his dedication and passion despite what he described as the "devastation of illnesses and deaths of many good friends." Among the losses that deeply grieved Bradbury was the death of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who was an intimate friend for many years. They remained close friends for nearly three decades after Roddenberry asked him to write for Star Trek, which Bradbury never did, objecting that he "never had the ability to adapt other people's ideas into any sensible form."
  Bradbury suffered a stroke in 1999 that left him partially dependent on a wheelchair for mobility. Despite this, he continued to write, and had even written an essay for The New Yorker, about his inspiration for writing, published only a week prior to his death. Bradbury made regular appearances at science-fiction conventions until 2009, when he retired from the circuit.
  Bradbury chose a burial place at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, with a headstone that reads "Author of Fahrenheit 451". On February 6, 2015, The New York Times reported that the house that Bradbury lived and wrote in for 50 years of his life, at 10265 Cheviot Drive in Cheviot Hills, Los Angeles, California, had been demolished by the buyer, architect Thom Mayne.
caption: Ray Bradbury's headstone in May 2012 prior to his death
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