Quick: what do you know about the famous science fiction author Ray Bradbury? If you're stuck with just Fahrenheit 451, you've got to read this.
Veronica Mittnacht of Flavorwire took nuggets from Sam Weller's Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews to reveal 10 things you didn't know about the writer. For example:
1. Many people know that Ray Bradbury wrote his most famous work, Fahrenheit 451 in just nine days on a rented typewriter in the basement of the UCLA library. However, what wasn’t known until recently is that in the process of writing the novel, he made a unique friend: Ernest Hemingway’s son. They rode the same bus every morning to the library and got to talking. Hemingway told the stranger that his favorite writers were “Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury,” and the two remained friends for decades.
5. In many ways, Bradbury was a writer of intuition. In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury was the first to predict the invention of flat-screen TVs, televised surveillance footage, ear-bud headphones, and ATMs — in the space of the nine days he spent writing the novel. However, it wasn’t until later that he realized how subtle his subconscious instincts really were: without knowing it, he’d named his four main characters after a paper company (Montag), a pencil company (Faber), an envelope company (Granger), and a now-gone office supply chain (Beatty).
6. Ray Bradbury never went to college. Instead, he went to the library all day, three times a week, until he got married at 27. To this day, he regularly organizes fundraisers for libraries, and refuses to touch e-reader devices like the Kindle.
Link - Thanks Veronica!