Bradbury wouldn’t have made it today as a writer in New York; he was too rough, too raw, too tender. (He attributed to New York critics a “terrible creative negatism.”) But Ray Bradbury, who never went to college and was entirely library educated, had what so many of the sophisticated, MFA-carrying writers today lack: passion, vitality, emotional awareness. And, maybe most admirably, he found a way to carry his imagination past the boundaries of childhood, where so many of us so often discard it.

theparisreview’s associate editor Stephen Andrew Hiltner’s tribute to Ray Bradbury