The Path to Writing a Biography

By  Sam Weller

The author with Ray Bradbury.

It is the question I am asked most often—“How does one become the authorized biographer of a literary legend?”

In this case, the author is Ray Bradbury. I worked with him over twelve years on four books and a graphic novel. Bradbury, of course, is the author of such timeless works of the fantastic as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Dandelion Wine,  to name a few.

Certainly, every biographer of a living writer or artist has their own decidedly singular path to their subject. In my case, my biography, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (HarperPerennial, 2006) grew out a profile I wrote about the author on the occasion of his 80th birthday for the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine. But truth be told, there is a more chimerical backstory that begins long before this. The story behind my becoming Ray Bradbury’s biographer was, well, rather Bradburian. 

My father read Bradbury aloud to my mother when I was nine months in utero.

Of course, the time came when I truly discovered Bradbury as a reader myself. I was 11—a magical age to discover the author. His ideas, from rockets traveling to Mars, to time travelers hunting dinosaurs, are filled with childlike wonder and awash in poetic language and rich metaphor. I found the very copy of the book my Dad had read to my Mom just before I was born – a frayed paperback of Bradbury’s frightening, dystopic, nightmarish collection of short stories, The Illustrated Man. It’s an odd book to read to a wife with child, but whatever the case, something clicked. And when I read the book, the opening sentences of the short story “The Long Rain,” I was literally hooked from word on.

I walked in to Ray Bradbury’s west Los Angeles home on Memorial Day weekend, 2000. What was scheduled to be an hour-long interview, instead went on for several hours. He was ebullient, excitable, full of philosophies, driven by ideas. This amazed me, given the fact he had suffered a near-fatal stroke just six-months prior. He enjoyed my enthusiasm and my knowledge of his life and work. Ray was a passionate man. This is vital for any writer who intends on spending years researching a subject. You must love it completely.

After that first remarkable meeting, he invited me back to visit. And of course, I did! I lived in Chicago, he resided in the City of Angels, but I wasn’t about to pass up an invite to foster a relationship with the man. I visited him a number of times in the summer and fall of 2000, having lunches, dinners, and attending plays he produced through his own theater company. I knew full-well, as a Bradbury scholar, there was no full-fledged biography of this remarkable creative tour de force. I asked him about this.

“Biography makes me very uncomfortable,” he responded. “It means you’re dead. Your life is over. I’m 80, call me in 35 or 40 years and we can work on a biography,” he chortled, sipping on a glass of merlot at his favorite steak house in Santa Monica. He also informed me that another author, a well-known collector, fan, and Sotheby’s auction house producer, Jerry Weist was assembling an illustrated coffee table book on Bradbury’s life. 

I told Ray there was room for two books, one illustrative, the other told in rich prose, awash in deep research and rich storytelling. They could be companion books, I told him. 

Ray had another idea. He proposed that I write Jerry’s book. “He is a collector. A fan,” Ray said. “He can supply all of the ephemera, and you can write it.”

Of course, this made me panic. Jerry Weist had already sold his book. He was under contract with a publishing house. Now, the great Ray Bradbury wanted to tell him that he wasn’t going to write it and that some journalist he had never met would furnish all the text.

I reached out to Jerry Weist immediately, whom I’d never met. Jerry and I agreed that we would join forces and somehow convince Ray Bradbury there was room for two books. And that’s exactly what happened. Ray changed his mind, telling me, “Jerry supplies the dots, you, Sam, connect them.” 

I worked for the next four years on Ray’s biography. This was no small feat. The files in his storied basement lair were a literary salvage lot. There was no organization. It was joyful chaos, a new year’s confetti storm of scattered letters, manuscript pages, photographs, and ephemera. But I was focused and patient and dedicated to having it all make sense. All of these fragments, I knew, had to somehow come together into a prose mosaic that told the remarkable life-fantastic of Ray Douglas Bradbury. 

It wasn’t always easy. He could be temperamental and demanding. I lived almost 2000 miles away from him, but there were times he wanted me there instantly. And why not? He was sharing his life. “I  want you here this weekend,” he would often say. “There is a film screening I’d love for you to attend!”

Weeks turned into months into years. In this time, we established trust. After Ray’s beloved wife Maggie passed in 2003, his daughters eventually acquiesced and hired several live-in nurses. When I suspected that one was being neglectful (this is an understatement), I sounded the alarms. This all became very complicated. I was a journalist—an objective reporter on the life of a writer. Trying to balance my role as a writer and as a human being was the great existential crisis of the entire project. But somehow, through luck and a fly-by-the-seat-of-the pants mentality, I navigated it all. Ray never wanted to see what I was writing. He respected the creative process too much. 

“I don’t want you to feel like I’m peering over your shoulder,” he said.

But then, in 2004, on his 84th birthday, he was hospitalized with diverticulitis. Confined to a boring hospital bed, he commanded me to bring him my manuscript. The book was done and had been submitted to my editor. 

I was somewhat terrified. The story I told was a true celebration of his life, but it was also a “warts and all” narrative. Not everything in the book cast him in the best light. After all, my job was to tell the complete life story, with energy and engaging scenes and putting down on the page all of his important memories and moments, good and bad.  

When I returned to the hospital room the next day, I saw that my manuscript was upside down on his rollaway hospital cart. Had he read the entire thing? I was mortified.

He laughed. “Relax,” he said. “You, Sam, have written a beautiful book,”

I was fortunate. I was blessed to work with a compassionate, understanding, creatively respectful subject. I am certain many biographers don’t have this experience. 

A few months later, Ray Bradbury was asked to come to the White House, to receive the “Medal of Arts” from President George W. Bush. In frail health, he was hesitant to travel. But he invited me, his biographer, to add this great accomplishment to the end of my book, which was then in the editing stages. 

And along the way, he taught me so much about the art of the biography because, after all, Ray Bradbury was one of the great storytellers.

On the cover of many of his 1970s paperbacks, he was deemed “the master of miracles.” 

This is a perfect summation. 

Sam Weller is the author of The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury and Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews. He is a two-time Bram Stoker Award winner. In addition to his books, he has written for the Paris Review, the L.A. Review of Books, and National Public Radio. Learn more at www.samweller.net