The masterly Bradbury.

The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, by Sam Weller (William Morrow, 400 pp., $26.95)

LONG ago, within the living memory of very few people, there were fire-balloons. These delicate fireworks--each a colorful paper balloon designed to be filled with the breath of a small fire in a miniature basket hung underneath--were carefully lit and sent skyward into the night on special occasions. They seem to have been especially popular in the small-town American Midwest. Ray Bradbury remembers being five years old and watching his grandfather light and release a fire-balloon outside the older man's home in Waukegan, Ill., on the Fourth of July in 1925: He and his grandfather together "held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself." Tears filled his eyes during this timeless moment--tears of joy, love, and a bittersweet sense of loss amid the beauty of life.

This sense of wonder--of gratitude at having lived--pervades Bradbury's fiction. It also fills Chicago-based journalist Sam Weller's excellent biography of a legendary figure, a small-town man with a gargantuan imagination, who was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bush in 2004 and turns 85 this year. As Weller shows in his detailed but lively book, it seemed unlikely at the beginning of Bradbury's life that such honors were in store for him.

Born in 1920, young Bradbury was gifted with the strange mixture of a remarkable memory (he claims to remember his own birth and his first few weeks of life), a brooding temperament, and a loud, gregarious personality. As a youth he was torn between becoming a writer or an actor; for a time, it seemed likely the actor would win out, because his early attempts at short fiction were dismally overwritten and derivative.

But Bradbury pressed on, determined to succeed at his chosen craft through death-grip determination and a strong sense of daring. If there is one recurring image in Weller's biography it is that of a man determined to succeed through single-minded effort, a teachable attitude, and stubborn belief that in time he would prevail. (It was through similar qualities that Weller was able to gain the unprecedented access to Bradbury that made this biography possible. Bradbury had consistently poled off would-be biographers, believing that "I have too much life left to live.") That success indeed came, but only after Bradbury met and cultivated friendships with three writers who shaped his fiction decisively: science-fiction masters Robert Heinlein, Henry Kuttner, and Leigh Brackett. From Heinlein he learned that all good stories concern human beings; from Kuttner he learned to write simply and avoid purple prose; and from Brackett he learned how to develop plots and how to pare his stories to their ideal form.

Weller tells how Bradbury--having moved with his parents from Waukegan to Los Angeles, where he struggled at his craft during the late 1930s and early 1940s--disciplined himself to write one short story per week, believing that with that sort of productivity he stood a better chance of catching a magazine editor's eye. He published his first story in 1938 and never looked back, placing his work in the sci-fi and fantasy "pulps" for many years before breaking into the "slicks," such as the Saturday Evening Post and Playboy. Bradbury has maintained the practice of writing a story every week for six decades.

His tales spring from a fecund moral imagination, which one of his friends, conservative man of letters Russell Kirk, defined as man's power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, and what we ought to be, amid the seeming chaos of life. "It is the strange faculty--inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only--of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest," wrote Kirk. If there is any area of Weller's otherwise admirable book in which more might have been said, it is on this particular aspect of Bradbury's work, which has occasionally been sneered at as excessively moralistic.

Weller makes plain the breadth of Bradbury's imagination. Consider the sheer number of memorable short stories. Any American reader who came of age during the past 50 years has encountered at least a half-dozen of the titles in the following list of often-anthologized stories: "There Will Come Soft Rains," "The Whole Town's Sleeping," "The Illustrated Man," "The Jar," "The Lake," "The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit," "The Smile," "Good-by, Grandma," "The Veldt," "The Pedestrian," "The Other Foot," "The Fog Horn," and "The Crowd." Weller provides information and insight on the writing of many of these stories. "The Pedestrian," for example, was inspired by a curious event that occurred one night when Bradbury and a friend were out for a stroll in Los Angeles. They were stopped by a policeman who wanted to know what they were doing. Only partly convinced by Bradbury's explanation that they were simply out for a walk, the cop let them off with a warning: "Well," the officer said, "don't do it again."

Because of the mental laziness of his critics, Bradbury has long been wrongly labeled a science-fiction writer. Weller correctly notes that science fiction is only one aspect of Bradbury's work. Bradbury might better be described as a fantasist or a teller of tales. Each work of fiction, whether it be the short stories or the novels for which he is also renowned--The Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Dandelion Wine (1957)--reflects enduring interests he developed during his boyhood: in magic, dinosaurs, the supernatural, and such elements of early-20th-century pop culture as carnivals, movies, and Buck Rogers comics. Weller aptly quotes an interview in which Bradbury summarized the pop-culture influences on his life: "'A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am,' Bradbury said with a laugh. 'But it burns with a high flame.'"

Portions of popular culture rise over time into the realm of higher culture; Bradbury embraces both levels. Thus the man who helped create such films as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and It Came from Outer Space could also write the script for John Huston's 1953 classic adaptation of Moby Dick. (Weller's description of Bradbury's tortuous relationship with Huston during the writing of Moby Dick is especially good, capturing the confusion and anguish Bradbury experienced as he was alternately praised and cruelly undercut by the legendary director.)

Weller's book is both admiring and honest. He writes matter-of-factly about the joys and struggles of Bradbury's 56- year marriage to Marguerite ("Maggie") McClure, who worked to support her husband's career during its early years, raised their four daughters, and forgave him much. Maggie's death in 2003 was a terrible blow to Bradbury, but he endured; despite her loss, the death of his longtime friends, and the effects of a stroke he suffered in 1999, Bradbury retains a hopeful attitude, the same view of life he confided to Russell Kirk a generation ago: "I accept the whole damn thing. It is neither all beautiful nor all terrible, but a wash of multitudinous despairs and exhilarations about which we know nothing. Our history is so small, our experience so limited, our science so inadequate, our theologies so crammed in mere matchboxes, that we know we stand on the outer edge of a beginning and our greatest history lies before us, frightening and lovely, much darkness and much light."

Long ago, there were fire-balloons and small-town carnivals. At one such carnival that camped near Waukegan, a mysterious, glowing performer known as "Mr. Electrico" gently touched young Ray Bradbury with an electrified sword and, amid the pulsing glare, commanded the wide-eyed boy, "Live forever!" By his own humanistic vision, industry, and literary genius--as recounted in Sam Weller's impressive biography--he just may do that.

Mr. Person is the author of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind and the forthcoming biography Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow(Cumberland House).