Ray Bradbury Dead At 91: Beloved 'Fahrenheit 451' Author Dies In Los Angeles

Ray Bradbury, the author of several fantasy, science fiction and mystery books, including the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 -- died Tuesday night in Los Angeles. Bradbury was 91.

Bradbury's death was confirmed by his family, as well as Sam Weller, Bradbury's biographer.

Bradbury, who had been rejected by the U.S. military due to his poor eyesight, first published science fiction stories in 1938, when he was a member of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. In 1939, he launched his own fanzine, called Futuria Fantasia.

Bradbury's first paid piece, Pendulum, was published in November 1941 in the pulp magazine Super Science Stories. He earned $15 for the story.

By 1942, Bradbury was a full-time writer. He wrote several short fantasy stories, many about humans who colonized Mars after fleeing an atomically devastated Earth, which he gathered into a collection called The Martian Chronicles. It would be his most well-known work in addition to Fahrenheit 451, which was named so to represent the temperature at which paper ignites, according to Bradbury.

In writing the short novel 'Fahrenheit 451,' I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades, Bradbury told Kingsley Amis in New Maps Of Hell: A Survey Of Science Fiction.

But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog, he said. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires, which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

Bradbury received several awards for his work, including an Emmy, the National Medal of Arts, and a special citation from the Pulitzer Board in 2007 for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have honored Bradbury each year with their award for screenwriting, called The Ray Bradbury Award.

What I have always been is a hybrid author, Bradbury said in 2009. I am completely in love with movies, and I am completely in love with theater, and I am completely in love with libraries.