who was bradbury inspired by besides Mr. Electrico, Poe and HG Wells??

Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wolfe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, L. Frank Baum, and just about anyone else between the covers of a book.

Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Heinlein are also mentioned as having influenced Mr. Bradbury's works.

Who was the female author for whom he finished a short story? He admired her style greatly and she was constantly supportive of his early writing. He mentions Cather and Wharton as well.

I think it is Leigh Brackett, and he also credits Henry Kuttner along with Leigh in the October Countrys dedication as to my hardest-working and most patient teachers.

[This message has been edited by uncle (edited 05-28-2002).]

[This message has been edited by uncle (edited 05-28-2002).]

Yes, he wrote a couple of stories with Leigh Brackett. He also mentioned Katherine Anne Porter as an influence. Oddly, though, I once asked him if he'd read or been influenced by H. H. Munro, "Saki," and he said no, it was "all John Collier."

I just re-read "Usher II", the prototype for "Fahrenheit 451". In it, Ray rattles off a list of authors: Poe, Lovecraft, Hawthorne, and Bierce. Next a list of characters, stories and places: St. Nicholas, the Headless Horseman, Snow White, Rumplestiltskin, the Phantom Rickshaw, the Land of Oz, Glinda the Good, Ozma, Jack Pumpkinhead, Polychrome, the Beanstalk, Sleeping Beauty, Alice, the Looking Glass, the Red King, andthe Oyster. This brings in: Clement Moore, Washinton Irving, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perault, L. Frank Baum, and Lewis Carol.

My favorite Washington Irving story is "The Legend of the Enchanted Soldier", which, I belive appears in "The Alhambra" or else in "Spanish Papers".

L. Frank Baum wrote 14 Oz books. The Characters mentioned come from "The Marvelous Land of Oz", which is the sequel to "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"

From the introduction to "S is For Space":

"Jules Verne was my father.
H.G. Wells was my wise uncle.
Edgar Allen Poe was the batwinged cousin we kept high in the back attic room.
Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were my brothers and friends.
There you have my ancestry.
Adding, of course, the fact that in all probablility Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was my mother.
With a family like that, how else could I have turned out than as I did: a writer of fantasy and most curious tales of science fiction.
I lived up in the trees with Tarzan a good part of my life with my hero Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I swung down out of the foliage I asked for a toy typewriter during my twelfth year, at Christmas. On this rattletrap machine I wrote my first John Carter, Warlord of Mars, imitation sequels, and from memory tapped out whole episodes of Chandu the Magician . . ." (He also mentions H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson.)

The novel, "Martian Chronicles" has a structure that is similar to Sherwood Anderson's "Winesberg, Ohio" and to Hemingway's "In Our Time". It would be hard to discount these as influences, also.

Just a short add-on.