Becoming Ray Bradbury

40. The Wheel of Fortune

| 245| 5 40The Wheel of Fortune In early 1952 William F. Nolan, who was about to begin his own career as a genre author, published a booklet documenting Bradbury’s creative output as projected through the end of the year. The Ray Bradbury Review included a comprehensive enumerative bibliography gathered over the three years that he had known Bradbury as a friend; the Review’s final tally listed 170 individual stories in print, as well as more than 50 anthology appearances. The next year Nolan privately printed a supplemental Bradbury Index advancing the published story count to 190 and the reprint total (including both magazines and anthologies) to more than 350. Nolan also offered a detailed account of Bradbury’s major works-in-progress as well as his media work, thus providing a valuable snapshot of the constantly increasing media projects that helped deflect Bradbury’s very real anxiety about the longer works-in-progress that Nolan reported in the Review and the Index with both high hopes and great fanfare. Other emerging writers were drawn to Bradbury, who provided inspiration and, for some of them, direct mentorship during the early 1950s. He had known Charles Beaumont the longest; as a teen, Beaumont had frequented Fowler’s Bookstore and met Bradbury there around 1946. During the spring of 1951 Beaumont sent him two stories-in-progress to critique, and Bradbury was instantly captivated by the originality of his ideas and the sensual style of his prose. These were Bradburyesque tales that probed the boundaries of reality and fantasy with controlledbutemotionalimpact,andBradburyofferedanimmediateblessing:“I believe in you as I have never believed in anyone before who has sent me stories.” Beaumont had an excellent sense for story structure, and his rich imagination led Bradbury to call him a “pomegranate writer,” bursting with seed.1 He would continuetocritiqueBeaumont’sstorydraftsforseveralmoreyearsastheyounger writer moved from genre success to major market magazines and on to a career writing for television and film. He carefully critiqued story drafts for both Beaumont and Nolan during these years, but his more distant relationships with other young writers were also influential. In 1950, Richard Matheson’s love of Bradbury’s social conscience, individualism, and “delicate sense of fantasy” prompted him to begin a correspondence . These letters allowed Matheson to discuss authorship rather than i-xvi_1-328_Elle.indd 245 6/27/11 2:52 PM 246 | the last night of the world specific manuscripts and showed how Bradbury could tailor his engagement to the specific hopes and aspirations of the young writers he believed in. Within a few years he would offer similar encouragement to George Clayton Johnson. Together with Bill Nolan and Chad Oliver, these writers became close friends; by the end of the decade (and with Bradbury’s encouragement), Beaumont, Johnson, and Matheson were writing for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. There were occasional collaborations as well, and over time Bradbury’s young friends became known as the California group of authors. In this way, Bradbury’s writing influence radiated out from UCLA Bards alumni like Sid Stebel and Russ Burton on through the California group, and some of these writers (notably George Clayton Johnson) gravitated into Bradbury ’s original 1948 writing group during the 1950s. He also began to interact with professional writers’ associations during these years; his friend Ken Crossen , creator of the Green Lama pulp and graphic fiction hero, introduced him to such organizations, an experience that paved the way for Bradbury’s eventual involvement with the Science Fiction Writers of America and the Writers’ Guild. He was beginning to interact easily with other established authors, and he was now a mentor for young authors who would figure prominently in the future development of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. But he never forgot his own mentors, and in the early 1950s he tried to repay the blessings they had provided him a decade earlier. Sadly,thecherishedeveningsofwineandliteraryconversationwithEdHamiltonandLeighBrackettHamiltonweregoneforever .In1949theymovedoutofthe tiny Venice Beach bungalow and headed east for an extended stay in the western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio borderlands where Hamilton had grown up and lived for much of his life. The next year they purchased a pioneer farmstead on the Ohio side of the border, and slowly began to transform this 132-year-old house into a modern home. It was close to Ed’s aging family, and Leigh fell in love with the countryside; both of them feared that the opening rounds of the Korean Conflict would lead inevitably into a Third World War, and...