By John R. Hughey

Touponce Eller Illustration by Ray Bradbury

During an interview with IU Home Pages, IUPUI professors Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce discussed Bradbury’s place in American literature. In their newly-released book, Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (Kent State University Press, 2004), the co-authors use textual, bibliographical and cultural studies to explore Bradbury’s fiction. The book presents new material about Bradbury drawn from his correspondence with publishers, agents and friends.

Q: How did you first become interested in studying Ray Bradbury’s work and when did you decide to co-author “The Life of Fiction?”

A. Eller: As a reader, I was hooked by his inimitable style from my first encounter with his fiction in the early 1960s. I’ve known him personally since my faculty days at the Air Force Academy in the late 1980s, and for the last decade, he has helped me research several of my own publications on his work. In the late 1990s, Bill Touponce, who had already published two books on Bradbury, convinced me to channel much of this bio-bibliographical research into a co-authored book-length study that would trace the evolution of Bradbury as a writer through his published and unpublished manuscripts. The result was Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction.

A. Touponce: Jon and I had different paths. My first exposure was in graduate school. I wrote my dissertation on Ray Bradbury in 1981 and began publishing after that. I’ve been working on this for 25 years. The idea to co-author with Jon happened after I went to a lecture Jon was giving…I like to think it was more than a coincidence.

Q: In your introduction, you state that Bradbury’s work transcends genres. What does that mean and how do you describe his work without categorizing?

A.Touponce: One of the things we wanted to move beyond is the notion that he’s a genre writer. It’s too narrow. After talking to him about his own life, he wants to be on the same shelf with Hawthorne and Poe. He thinks of himself as a serious author, with a capital “A” Bradbury is a great writer and he can be read alongside great American authors. He uses genre to express his own personal authorial sense. He left behind the sci-fi ghetto in the early ’50s after he was beginning to break out and found a wider market.

Q: What did you hope to accomplish in your book?

A. Eller: Since I had access to Bradbury’s manuscripts and to the massive book and manuscript collections of Bradbury’s principal bibliographer, Professor Donn Albright of the Pratt Art Institute, I wanted to explore the publishing record of Bradbury’s fiction as well as the significant body of unpublished material that survives but is largely unknown today. In the process, I found that Bradbury’s prolific published fictions mask an altogether different history of composition than the one we see through his books. Many of his stories were written years before they were published, and, in fact, many of his story collections of the last quarter century contain stories written during his most productive years—the 1940s and 1950s. There are also several novel-length projects that have never reached print; some of these unpublished projects underlie his most famous fictions, including Fahrenheit 451 and Dandelion Wine. My work gave Bill Touponce a look at this vast unknown terrain, and Bill was soon able to trace the way that Bradbury evolved as a master storyteller who has achieved success as both a popular and literary writer. We wanted to tell this story in The Life of Fiction, and I think we have succeeded in bringing Bradbury’s evolving notion of authorship into public view for the first time.

Q: Over the past several years “Fahrenheit 451” has been selected in several cities for the “One Book” reading program. Why do you think this particular book holds such a fascination with readers?

A. Touponce: It provokes a lot of discussion. It deals with our ability to read, to speak one’s mind. That’s awfully hard to do today. It isn’t about censorship. And Bradbury agrees with me on that. It’s about what it means to be a literary person. The main character rediscovers the power of literacy. I also think it’s about fearless speech. That’s something we prize in a democracy.

Q: What’s next? Do you plan to continue studying Bradbury?

A. Eller: Over the last six years, I’ve teamed up with Bradbury’s principal bibliographer, Donn Albright, to conduct an extensive series of interviews with Bradbury on his life and career. The first fruits of these interviews take the form of B Is for Bradbury, a book that chronicles all 440 of his published short stories through Bradbury’s own recollections. While this book is in progress, I’m also working with Albright to prepare a restored edition of Bradbury’s classic juvenile novel, The Halloween Tree. But the most exciting project is just beginning. With the support and sponsorship of IUPUI’s Institute for American Thought, I’ve established a Bradbury Chronicles Correspondence Database. The database will calendar all known correspondence to and from Bradbury during his seven decades as a professional writer. He is enthusiastic about this project, and I’ve already prepared a prototype for the institute’s Web site in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. These projects and others tie in with our graduate program in professional editing, which includes concentrations in the editing of literary and historical texts.

Editor’s note: Jonathan Eller is professor of English and associate director and senior textual editor, Institute for American Thought, School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. William Touponce is professor of English and adjunct professor of American Studies at the Institute for American Thought.