Jonathan Eller, an IUPUI professor, displays a poster in the Ray Bradbury Center archives promoting a Ray Bradbury play. Eller, the director of the center, is the author of “Becoming Ray Bradbury” and an editor of scholarly collections of the late author’s works. Photo by Ronald Hawkins.

INDIANAPOLIS

On Thursday night on the IUPUI campus, Jonathan R. Eller helped others do what he helped the late author Ray Bradbury do — look back at the golden years of the legendary writer’s life and work.

Eller, an English professor at IUPUI, is the director of the Ray Bradbury Center. He is also a Bradbury biographer and an editor who has been publishing restored versions of the author’s work that reflected the original intentions in his early works.

Along with now-retired professor William F. Touponce, Eller was the co-founder of the center, which has a vast archive of Bradbury-related materials including manuscripts, published works, scholarly materials and even rare movie and theater posters.

Eller presented the illustrated lecture, “Cry the Cosmos: Ray Bradbury and the American Imagination” Thursday in the IUPUI Campus Center Theater, 420 University Blvd., Indianapolis. The lecture was the subject of the 2012 John D. Barlow Lecture in the Humanities.

A former Air Force intelligence officer, Eller was transferred by the Air Force from Tokyo to Bloomington, where he earned a master’s degree and doctorate at Indiana University. He spent the rest of his career as a professor at the Air Force Academy and exchange professor of English at the Naval Academy.

When he was still in the Air Force in 1989, he met Ray Bradbury and was assigned to host him for a week-long conference that year.

“I asked him the kind of questions the general public never asked him,” Eller said. “Those questions fascinated him. He was always asked, ‘What’s the central theme of Fahrenheit 451,’ or, ‘Do you think we’ll ever go to Mars.’ ...

“I’d ask him questions like, ‘Ray do you remember rewriting your ‘Weird Tales’ stories to put them in ‘The October Country’ What things did you change in The Scythe? Why did you change that story? It’s the kind of question he never gets.

“We eventually developed this relationship where I became a historical repository. And I working with a few other people who were close to him would always go out and visit him and the last 15 years in particular I would go out to begin to put together the story of his life.”

Bradbury, who died June 5 in Los Angeles at 91-years-old, was a child of the Midwest, born in Waukegan, Ill. The family moved to California in 1934. His work, however, frequently reflected his Midwest background.

Bradbury is regarded as one of the “golden age” of science fiction writers. He knew many of the other writers from that period and received help from some of them early in his career.

At the age of 17 in 1937, Bradbury was invited to join the Los Angeles chapter of the Science Fiction League, which crumbled by 1940 and became the L.A. Science Fantasy Society. One member was Robert A. Heinlein. Later, he knew Isaac Asimov and became good friends with Arthur C. Clarke.

“He (Bradbury) knew everybody and he was a good spokesman for science fiction and bringing it out in mainstream literature, but at the same time he didn’t have time to keep his ties with science fiction,” Eller said.

Eller and others generally agree that Bradbury’s best writing was done in the 1940s, 1950s through 1962. It’s not that he lost his talent then, but he became more focused on writing scripts for television and movies and producing his own plays.

From 1986 through 1992, he hosted “Ray Bradbury Theater,” a TV anthology series based on his stories. He produced his own plays until the last two years of his life.

Published in 1962 when he was 42, “Something Wicked This Way Comes” was Bradbury’s first sustained novel. “The Martian Chronicles,” published in the late spring of 1950, was a novelized series of stories. “Fahrenheit 451,” published in 1952 at the height of McCarthyism, was a novella that grew into a short novel.

Ray Bradbury’s work included science fiction, detective stories, mysteries, fantasy. His work had several identifying traits. Hundreds of his stories were published.

“There were stories with what came to be known as the Bradbury twist, where there’s a surprise ending,” Eller said.

The Midwest also flavored his work.

“It had to do with identity,” Eller said. “This is the other aspect that is memorable about Ray Bradbury. You had the edgy light horror and unexpected fantasy work, but then you have these great lyric studies of nostalgic stories, wistful stories, remembering the past. He’s big on remembering the past.”

Bradbury had a mainstream science fiction writers view of the universe that going out to the cosmos is humanity’s destiny. The seeming step away by the United States from space exploration concerned him even though the Mariner probes gave him hope the nation would return to space.

“He was one of the great spokespersons for the American space program and for the world’s movement into space,” Eller said. “He felt the rocket had two destinies: it could deliver nuclear weapons and destroy us or take us to the stars.

“He felt that going to space was the only way to save ourselves, to have a peaceful constructive purpose. ...Ray’s point of view was, if we go to Mars we become the Martians.”

Eller’s work

In addition to the scholarly compilations of Ray Bradbury’s work, Jonathan Eller is writing a series of biographies about Bradbury. The first, “Becoming Ray Bradbury,” takes the author’s life story through August 1953 after he’s finished writing “Fahrenheit 451” and before heading to Ireland to write the script for John Huston’s filmed version of “Moby Dick.” The second book is tentatively named “Bradbury Unbound” and will take his life until the beginning of the 1970s.

The center isn’t generally open to the public, but appointments can be made to visit the center.

Story comments

No comments on this article yet.

Posting comments on this web site requires you to be logged in.

• Create your account
• Log in to your account