There are certain icons that remain embedded in Waukegan lore. Ray Bradbury, the city’s literary favorite son, is one of them.
Waukegan has gone to great lengths to keep Bradbury’s legacy alive since the author was born and grew up in the city before his family joined the 1930s migration to California. Most acknowledge time spent in Waukegan was crucial in his development as a writer.
Waukegan has Ray Bradbury Park near his former childhood home in the middle of the block on Park Street, north of Washington Street. The Waukegan Park District holds its annual Ray Bradbury Dandelion Wine Arts and Music Festival in August, the month of his birth.
The Waukegan Public Library, built on the site of his former grade school, has a Ray Bradbury Room. Outside the library at Clayton and County streets is the 12-foot gleaming stainless steel statue “Fantastical Traveler” by Maryland artist Zachary Oxman. Dedicated in 2019, it has Bradbury, book in hand, astride a futuristic rocket ship like a space cowboy.
His personal papers and collection will be prominently featured in the ongoing makeover into a historical museum of the old Carnegie Library at Sheridan Road and Washington Street, where he spent many a youthful day poring over books. Of course, there is Green Town Tavern on South Genesee Street, named for the city, based on Waukegan, in Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine.” The eatery has a killer Reuben sandwich, a special on Wednesdays.
So, it was with some concern that the many Bradburyians in and about Waukegan have kept silent since a reviewer in the New York Times last month skewered the prolific author, who during his life — he died in 2012 at age 91 — received an Academy Award, two Emmy awards and a Pulitzer Prize.
The target of Times book critic Dwight Garner’s acrimony was a compilation of letters curated by Bradbury biographer, Jonathan R. Eller, also co-founder of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. In a forward to the book, Eller says of “Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury”: “The selection of letters in this volume offers the first sustained look at his inner life from his late teens to his ninth decade.”
Garner, however, dismisses Bradbury’s correspondence. “There is no sugarcoating it: Bradbury’s letters are amazing in their dullness and sterility,” he opines.
The Timesman nitpicks over the book’s organization of the mail by category, instead of a timeline. In the end, he offers little praise for Bradbury and has “inchoate feelings of distress” over the book.
“I’m sorry, Ray,” Garner writes. “I have no idea whether you were a big phony, a rattling empty can, but this book makes you seem like one.” Ouch.
However, other media outlets were effusive in their praise of the book. The only negative review I could find was in the Times. Perhaps Garner was off his feed the day he wrote his assessment.
As a homer and Bradbury fan, seems to me we’re lucky we have his letters to get a peek into the mind of one of the nation’s foremost modern authors. His book “Fahrenheit 451” continues to be banned in many locales, and many of his sci-fi books foresaw the future from the astral plane of the 1950s and ’60s.
Fortunately, his letters exist. Future critics and biographers of authors of the new millennium might not be so lucky.
Paper epistles are as scarce as black-and-white televisions. Emails and social media posts, many which fade away like old photos, will have to do.
Yet, Garner carps about Bradbury’s collection: “They skim the surface like water bugs. Bradbury rarely mentions his family or incidents from his life. There is no grit, no grease.”
Most authors keep their best prose for their craft on the printed page, and not waste it writing to acquaintances. Or so I was told by a few. Especially in the 20th century, when cursive and hunt-and-peck typewritten correspondence started going the way of steam locomotion, much to the detriment of the U.S. Postal Service.
While Garner dissed Bradbury’s correspondence, critics at the highly respected Kirkus Reviews praised the volume as, “An inside look at the beloved writer.” They went on to say: “Fans of Bradbury and literature in general will relish this rich, well-curated collection.”
Kirkus also called the book “highly readable.” One can ask how can two reviews be polar opposites?
Perhaps Garner overlooked one of the letters, to Bernard Berenson, the noted art historian and Bradbury friend. In it, according to the Kirkus review, Bradbury confesses that when, “I write my stories, I am as overjoyed as anyone who reads them later.”
More Top Picks Recycling Bin
Most of us know that same feeling when reading Bradbury.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
X @sellenews