The Martians From SoCal

Before Ray Bradbury Shaped the Future, L.A. Shaped Him

In an international city known for its love of technology and novelty, its mighty freeways, and its complex and mostly harmonious ethnic mix, an automobile-scorning Midwesterner may seem like the kind of anomaly for which the place is justly famous. Ray Bradbury, who died Tuesday at the age of 91, was not, of course, a typical Angeleno. But he was, in his way, an exemplary one.

It was the fields and front-porches of the Midwest that gave Bradbury much of his inner landscape, and a carnival magician back in Illinois …