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Photo by Sophie Bassouls / Sygma via Getty Images, Courtesy The Ray Bradbury Literary Works, LLC.

Ray Bradbury has a vacation house in Palm Springs, California, in the desert at the base of the Santa Rosa mountains. Information technology's a Rat Pack–era affair, with a chrome-and-turquoise kitchen and a small swimming pool in back. A few years ago, Bradbury let me look through some files stored in his garage every bit part of my enquiry for a biography. Inside a tiny storage cupboard I found a compact filing chiffonier covered in grit and fallen ceiling plaster, which contained, among a flurry of tear sheets and yellowing book contracts, a binder marked paris review. In the binder was the manuscript of a remarkable unpublished interview that this magazine had conducted with the writer in the late 1970s.

It'southward unclear why the interview was abandoned, but co-ordinate to an attached editorial memo, editor George Plimpton found the starting time draft "a bit informal in places, maybe overly enthusiastic." Bradbury, who will turn 90 in August, cannot recall why he never finished the interview; he figures that when he was asked to revisit it, he had moved on to other projects. Just with the rediscovery of the manuscript, he agreed to give it some other become and bring information technology upward to engagement. Since the original interviewer, William Plummer, aParis Review contributing editor, died in 2001, we supplemented the original sessions with new conversations.

Bradbury was built-in in 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, the son of a lineman for the local power company. Every bit a child, he developed a passion for the books of 50. Frank Baum and Edgar Allan Poe and immersed himself in pop culture, from movie house to comic strips to traveling circuses. Because Bradbury's father was often out of piece of work during the twenties and thirties, the family repeatedly moved between Illinois and Tucson, Arizona. His sense of uprootedness and dislocation was compounded by the death of his beloved grandfather when he was five, and his babe sister's death from pneumonia 2 years later. The feel of great loss appears frequently in his work.

By the spring of 1934, lured by the prospects of sunshine and steady employment, the Bradbury family moved to California, where Bradbury has lived ever since. As a teenager, he roller-skated all over Hollywood, collecting autographs and taking photos with stars like Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, and George Burns. After he graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1938, he joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction League, befriending writers Robert Heinlein and Leigh Brackett. In 1940, with the help of Heinlein, he made his offset professional auction, to a West Coast literary mag chosenScript. Bradbury'southward poor eyesight kept him out of the 2nd World War, and it was during those years that he established himself in the pages of pulp-fiction magazines likeWeird Tales andAstounding Science Fiction.The Martian Chronicles, his 2d book, was embraced past the science-fiction community as well as critics, a rare achievement for the genre. Christopher Isherwood hailed Bradbury as "truly original" and a "very great and unusual talent." Three years after Bradbury published the novel for which he is best known,Fahrenheit 451.

In all, Bradbury has written more than fifty books, includingThe Illustrated Man,Dandelion Vino,Something Wicked This Style Comes, and his 2009 story collection,We'll Ever Have Paris. He has worked ofttimes in television and film, writing teleplays forAlfred Hitchcock Presents and the screenplay for John Huston's 1956 accommodation ofMoby-Dick. In 1964, he established the Pandemonium Theatre Visitor, where he started producing his own plays—he is even so actively involved with the theater today. He has likewise published several poetry collections, includingWhen Elephants Terminal in the Dooryard Bloomed. He has even worked in architecture, contributing to the design of San Diego'south Westfield Horton Plaza and the interior of Spaceship Earth at Disney's EPCOT Center. For his life's achievements, he was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2000 and, in 2004, the National Medal of Arts.

Despite recent setbacks—a stroke in 1999 and the death of Marguerite, his wife of fifty-six years, in 2003—Bradbury has remained extraordinarily active. He continues to write and he remains charming and filled with boyish jubilation. When dining out he regularly orders vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce for dessert. He has just completed a new drove of short stories, tentatively titled "Juggernaut." He recently told me he still lives by his lifelong credo, "Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down."