Ray Bradbury, requiescat in pace ...

[David Morris]

http://thedailywh.at/2012/06/06/letter-of-note-of-the-day-16/


This 2006 letter from the late Ray Bradbury to the assistant director
of Fayetteville Public Library goes behind the scenes of the writing
of Fahrenheit 451:

Dear Shawna Thorup:

I’m glad to hear that you good people will be celebrating my book,
“Fahrenheit 451.” I thought you might want to hear how the first
version of it, 25,000 words and which appeared in a magazine, got
done.

I needed an office and had no money for one. Then one day I was
wandering around U.C.L.A. and I heard typing down below in the
basement of the library. I discovered there was a typing room where
you could rent a typewriter for ten cents a half hour. I moved into
the typing room along with a bunch of students and my bag of dimes,
which totaled $9.80, which I spent and created the 25,000 word version
of “The Fireman” in nine days. How could I have written so many words
so quickly? It was because of the library. All of my friends, all of
my loved ones, were on the shelves above and shouted, yelled and
shrieked at me to be creative. So I ran up and down the stairs,
finding books and quotes to put in my “Fireman” novella. You can
imagine how exciting it was to do a book about book burning in the
very presence of the hundreds of my beloveds on the shelves. It was
the perfect way to be creative; that’s what the library does.

I hope you enjoy reading my passionate output, which became larger a
few years later and became popular, thank God, with a lot of people.

I send you all my good wishes,

(Signed)