Marvin E. Mengeling

Red Planet, Flaming Phoenix, Green Town: Some Early Bradbury Revisited Marvin E. Mengeling

At last, a book for the general reader on one of America's perennially popular and important writers, Ray Bradbury. Literary critics, English teachers and students may find much of value in Mengeling's analysis of The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, but be warned, he avoids the technical literary jargon and convoluted writing style so common in literary criticism. Making use of research into Bradbury's family history and his boyhood in Waukegan, Illinois (Green Town in his works), and drawing on his taped interviews with Bradbury, Mengeling proposes that Bradbury's complex relationship with his father Leonard, more than any other factor energized the writing of his first four novels and helped determine Bradbury's strong interest in such subjects as ethnic diversity and the American Dream of Success. Mengeling believes that only through a better understanding of the psychological dynamics involved in Bradbury's self-perceived place in his family and its history can one properly appreciate the multi-leveled nature of some of his most important early work and the relationship of the Mars stories about the future to the Green Town stories about the past.