Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror, best known for The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). He was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on 22 August 1920 and died in Los Angeles in June 2012, aged 91 (Wikipedia gives 5 June, the SF Encyclopedia 6 June).

His first book, the story collection Dark Carnival, was published in 1947 by Arkham House, a small press in Sauk City, Wisconsin. Doubleday published The Martian Chronicles in 1950; the British edition, issued by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1951 as The Silver Locusts, drops "Usher II" and adds "The Fire Balloons". The Illustrated Man (Doubleday, 1951) followed, then Fahrenheit 451, expanded from his 1951 story "The Fireman" and published by Ballantine in October 1953. Later books include The October Country (1955), Dandelion Wine (Doubleday, 1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (Simon and Schuster, 1962).

He received the National Medal of Arts in 2004 and a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize board in 2007.

For collectors, Dark Carnival (Arkham House, 1947) is the starting point as his first book. Fahrenheit 451 is complicated: Ballantine issued it first as a paperback, with a hardback soon after, and the hardback run included 200 signed and numbered copies bound in asbestos. The Doubleday Martian Chronicles (1950) and its distinct British counterpart The Silver Locusts (Hart-Davis, 1951) are separate first editions, and Hart-Davis also issued the first British Fahrenheit 451 in 1954, without the two extra stories of the Ballantine printing.