In the spring of 2007, IUPUI's School of Liberal Arts created the nation's first center for the study of science fiction and fantasy author Ray Bradbury (1920–2012), one of the best-known American cultural figures of the twentieth century. During his seven-decade career, Bradbury published more than four hundred stories and the books that grew out of them, including The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The October Country, and two enduring titles that emerged from his early Midwestern years—Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Fahrenheit 451, his classic cautionary tale of censorship and book burning, remains a perennial bestseller more than sixty years after publication.
With the encouragement of the late Mr. Bradbury and a number of scholars, fellow writers, and collectors, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies has been able to build a comprehensive multiple-source research archive. The Center has gone on to establish, in partnership with the Kent State University Press, a journal, The New Ray Bradbury Review, and a Modern Language Association seal-approved critical edition, The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, an eight-volume series that recovers the seldom-seen earliest versions of his oldest tales.
The Center also maintains a large research library of Bradbury's publications (including many foreign language editions of his books and scarce copies of the pulp genre magazines where many of his earliest stories were first published), as well as anthologies and reference books for the broader study of science fiction and fantasy.
During the fall of 2013, these resources were suddenly transformed into one of the nation’s premier single-author archives by the arrival of two landmark gifts that, together, comprise most of the working archives and personal artifacts remaining in Mr. Bradbury’s home at the time of his passing in June 2012. Mr. Bradbury’s longtime friend and principal bibliographer, Donn Albright, donated the author’s books and papers, which he had received as a personal bequest. The resulting Bradbury-Albright Collection now forms the centerpiece of what we have designated the Bradbury Memorial Archive, consisting of a direct gift to the Center from the Bradbury family. This gift consists of Mr. Bradbury’s office bookcases and furniture (including two desks and three typewriters dating from the 1950s), his voice recordings, selected motion picture and television adaptations of his work, his last forty years of incoming correspondence, and a lifetime of awards and mementos.
If you wish to contact the Center, please e-mail or write to the director:
Jonathan R. Eller
Director, Center for Ray Bradbury Studies
jeller@iupui.edu
A small collection of photos from the Center.
The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies maintains photocopies of letters to and from Bradbury written between 1938 and the early years of the twenty-first century. The photocopy letter files are not available to researchers, but the date, archival location and correspondent records are in the process of being calendared and entered into the Bradbury Chronicles Correspondence Database. As it comes on-line, the Chronicles Database will represent the only consolidated listing (union catalog) of letters to and from Bradbury held in various institutional and private collections around the country. The listing is continually growing as new holdings are identified and calendared.
The BCCdb is designed to be a searchable web-mounted relational database. Beyond the basic calendar information (writer, recipient, date written), the data fields for each letter's record include content keywords and the location of the original document. The holding institutions are identified by the standard Library of Congress MARC code designators; for ease of reference, the institutions and their MARC codes are listed below. An updated hard copy of the database will be maintained on-site for use by visiting researchers. Letter contents will not be reproduced in this database; researchers seeking to study letter contents will need to contact the holding archive for information concerning permissions and access. All letters deemed personal, confidential or sensitive in nature will not be calendared in the database. Letters held in restricted collections will not be calendared unless permission has been granted by both the author (or executor) and the owner of the collection.
The off-line database prototype consists of calendar records for more than 180 letters between Mr. Bradbury and his editors at the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (the majority written between 1949 and 1967). Limited core fields (author-recipient-date-location) have been completed on another thousand letters, and these will be entered into the database as time permits. Once the prototype is fully searchable and data entry procedures perfected, the listings will be brought on-line. A target date has not been established for on-line status, but an interim non-searchable spreadsheet version will provide a partial calendar record while the main database records are converted into a searchable format. A sample interim spreadsheet, containing the first eight letters calendared in the F&SF prototype format, appears below. The holdings identified for this sample include The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana (InUlilly), Syracuse University (NySyU), and Bradbury’s personal papers (designated CABradbury).
| # | Writer | Recipient | Date | Location | Description | Keywords/Abstracts | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bradbury, Ray | Boucher, Anthony | 1947.07.10 | Otto | TLS | Thanks Boucher for his review of Dark Carnival. Hopes to meet him soon. References to Heinlein, Brackett. | |
| 2 | Boucher, Anthony | Bradbury, Ray | 1949.09.05 | InUlilly | TLS | Considering reprint of "The Silent Towns" for second issue of F&SF. Suggests title change from earlier Charm printing. | |
| 3 | Bradbury, Ray | Boucher, Anthony | 1949.09.06 | CABradbury | TLS | Discusses "The Silent Towns," Charm, "Way in the Middle of the Air," "There Will Come Soft Rains," "And the Moon Be Still As Bright," The Martian Chronicles. | |
| 4 | Bradbury, Ray | Boucher, Anthony | 1949.09.09 | NySyU | TLS | Discusses "Ylla," The Martian Chronicles, MacLean's, the Poe Centennial, Mick McComas, [Lawrence] Spivak. | |
| 5 | McComas, J. Francis | Bradbury, Ray | 1949.09.19 | CABradbury | TLS (S&S ltrhead recto) | F&SF wants a Bradbury story for the second issue. Passes on buying "The Silent Towns" and "Ylla." | Excerpt in The Eureka Years (1982). |
| 6 | McComas, J. Francis | Bradbury, Ray | 1949.09.28 | InUlilly | TL; carbon (S&S ltrhead verso) | Suggests changes to Hawthorne and Bierce characterizations in "The Exiles"; enjoys Bradbury's characterization of Poe. | Published in The Eureka Years (1982). |
| 7 | Bradbury, Ray | McComas, J. Francis | 1949.10.03 | NySyU | TLS | Discusses "The Exiles," "The Emissary," "Uncle Einar," Dark Carnival, The Martian Chronicles, Unknown, "Way in the Middle of the Air." | Published in The Eureka Years (1982). |
| 8 | McComas, J. Francis | Bradbury, Ray | 1949.10.07 | InUlilly | TL; carbon (S&S ltrhead verso) | Conditionally accepts "The Exiles" as a reprint title for second issue of F&SF, pending revisions. Discusses Hawthorne characterization. | Published in The Eureka Years (1982). |
Ray Bradbury — Official Author Site
Bradbury Short Story Finder — Nichols site Univ. of Wolverhampton, UK
Center for Archival Collections — The Ray Bradbury Collection (BGSU)
Fahrenheit 451 quick video by Academic Earth
Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Ray Bradbury — Unofficial Russian Site
Ray Bradbury — Unofficial Site Hosted by Phil Nichols
Ray Bradbury Entry at Wikipedia
Institute for American Thought
0010 Education/Social Work
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
Indianapolis, Indiana, 46202-5157 USA
Phone: (317) 278-3374
Fax: (317) 274-2170
Email: iat@iupui.edu
