...RAY DOUGLAS BRADBURY He was an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and poet. Although the genre of many of Ray Bradbury’s stories is fiction, he rejected being categorized as a science fiction author, claiming that the only story he has ever written that is a science fiction story is Fahrenheit 451. BIOGRAPHY Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. He enjoyed a relatively idyllic childhood in Waukegan, which he later incorporated into several semi-autobiographical novels and short stories. Bradbury's life revolved around magic, magicians, circuses, and other such fantasies. He decided to become a writer at about age 12 or 13. He later said that he made this decision to "live forever" through his fiction. His first official pay as a writer came for contributing a joke to George Burns's Burns & Allen Show. In 1937, he became a member of the Los Angeles Science Fiction League, whose help enabled him to publish four issues of his own science-fiction fan magazine, or "fanzine," Futuria Fantasia. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. His formal education ended there because they had no money to send him to college due to the Depression. However, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942. He published his first short story in a fan magazine in 1938. Bradbury says that he learned to write by recalling his own experiences. Many...
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...Matthew Chick Language Arts Mr Shulist Grade 11 Language arts final exam essay We can create the most amazing, beautiful, and wonderful things ranging from arts to medical supplies, but the evil that lurks within the destructive devices which we also create will destroy everything beautiful and peaceful in a blink of an eye. We made these destructive devices. We are all humans, and it is our natural thing to survive and progress. So why then, are we creating things to make murder easier? We need to be a united world, with one thing tying us together, to survive, and to make our home a safer place for us all. Are we going to let this destructiveness represent us, the human race, or are we going to prosper among the beautiful, and life giving resources that we create and Earth provides? In the poem by Sara Teasdale ‘There will come soft rains’, it says that “no one would mind, neither bird nor tree if mankind perished utterly. And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, would scarcely know that we were gone.” This quite apparent reality is that the earth herself or anything else that we had not killed, would not bat an eye when we die. Earth would reclaim herself, if there is anything to reclaim. Birds and trees when we are gone will never know anything again. Because if we are gone, everything comes with us. Unlike the previous two world wars where millions were killed, if world war three ever did happen, we would all die. Nuclear bombs, radiation, terror, disease, global...
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...Fahrenheit 451 A Cautionary Tale (there may be grammar and or spelling mistakes.) By: Class: English 3 Honors Teacher: Fahrenheit 451 is a novel set in a futuristic America focused on a “fireman” named Montag Montag. In this world firemen like Montag set the blazes rather than extinguish them. Books are banned and if they were found in your house your home was burned with the books in it. As a result of owning a book you would languish for the rest of your days in a government facility. Montag had no problems with his job after all who wouldn’t love getting paid to burn things? Then one day they got a call about a woman who had a whole library of books in her house. When they arrived to do their job only one thing was wrong. The police hadn’t taken the woman away yet. It is here the story begins, with a woman who refuses to leave even as they are dousing her home with kerosene. When they try to remove her she reveals a kitchen match in her hand scaring them out of the house, she then lights the match committing suicide. Shaken by this incident no one talks on the ride back to the station. On his way home Montag runs into his new neighbor, seventeen year old Clarisse McClellan. A chatty, young girl who opens his eyes to the world of nature and not being one of societies stooges. After this meeting Montag returns home to find his wife overdosed on sleeping pills and promptly calls for help. Instead of paramedics he gets two technicians who are nothing more than plumbers...
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...Comments on FUTURE SHOCK C. P. Snow: "Remarkable ... No one ought to have the nerve to pontificate on our present worries without reading it." R. Buckminster Fuller: "Cogent ... brilliant ... I hope vast numbers will read Toffler's book." Betty Friedan: "Brilliant and true ... Should be read by anyone with the responsibility of leading or participating in movements for change in America today." Marshall McLuhan: "FUTURE SHOCK ... is 'where it's at.'" Robert Rimmer, author of The Harrad Experiment: "A magnificent job ... Must reading." John Diebold: "For those who want to understand the social and psychological implications of the technological revolution, this is an incomparable book." WALL STREET JOURNAL: "Explosive ... Brilliantly formulated." LONDON DAILY EXPRESS: "Alvin Toffler has sent something of a shock-wave through Western society." LE FIGARO: "The best study of our times that I know ... Of all the books that I have read in the last 20 years, it is by far the one that has taught me the most." THE TIMES OF INDIA: "To the elite ... who often get committed to age-old institutions or material goals alone, let Toffler's FUTURE SHOCK be a lesson and a warning." MANCHESTER GUARDIAN: "An American book that will ... reshape our thinking even more radically than Galbraith's did in the 1950s ... The book is more than a book, and it will do more than send reviewers raving ... It is a spectacular outcrop of a formidable, organized intellectual effort ... For the first time in history...
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...Copyright Salman Rushdie, 1988 All rights reserved VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd. Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190, Wairau Road, Auckland ro, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Published in 1989 by Viking Penguin Inc. For Marianne Contents I The Angel Gibreel II Mahound III Ellowen Deeowen IV Ayesha V A City Visible but Unseen VI Return to Jahilia VII The Angel Azraeel VIII The Parting of the Arabian Seas IX A Wonderful Lamp Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon. Daniel Defoe, _The History of the Devil_ I The Angel Gibreel "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again...
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