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Many of you know the importance Ray Bradbury played in my life, as he did in so many others around the world. I grew up without a lot of adult supervision (to put it mildly). I started to read at the age of 3 and was fortunate enough that one of the first books I can truly remember is one of Mr. Bradbury’s short stories. The nature of his writing, the stories and their underlying moral message planted the seed the developed into my love of individual freedom and responsibility. Mr. Bradbury’s sensibility as conveyed through his literature that allowed me to survive through difficult times and eventually become a decent adult. As I enjoyed his work as an adult I realized it was a conservatism that he imparted in his stories, a classic American sensibility, all the while sending a message that anything, yes anything, was truly possible and that imagination was a key ingredient to making things happen.

I’ve said this before on my show and I understand it more than ever–I don’t know what would have happened to me without Ray Bradbury’s stories. This may be difficult for some to understand, but for those of us who are book worms, reading and stories inform our lives. As child for me this was the outlet which helped frame who I became. I finally had the honor and pleasure of getting to know him through my work. He was as wonderful and inspiration as you might imagine. He was his work. He continued to write every day, and now he is gone and there will be no more short stories, books or plays. I’ll miss him very much but thank God his work will be there forever.

So, do yourself and a kid you know a favor–grab a Bradbury book of short stories. Read them and share them. It’s a gift he’s left for all of us.

Ray Bradbury, the writer whose expansive flights of fantasy and vividly rendered space-scapes have provided the world with one of the most enduring speculative blueprints for the future, has died. He was 91.

Bradbury died Tuesday night, his daughter, Alexandra Bradbury, told the Associated Press. No other details were immediately available.

Author of more than 27 novels and story collections—most famously “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “Dandelion Wine” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes”—and more than 600 short stories, Bradbury has frequently been credited with elevating the often-maligned reputation of science fiction. Some say he singlehandedly helped to move the genre into the realm of literature.

“The only figure comparable to mention would be [Robert A.] Heinleinand then later [Arthur C.] Clarke,” said Gregory Benford, a UC Irvine physics professor who is also a Nebula award-winning science fiction writer. “But Bradbury, in the ’40s and ’50s, became the name brand.”

Much of Bradbury’s accessibility and ultimate popularity had to do with his gift as a stylist—his ability to write lyrically and evocatively of lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense of visual clarity and small-town familiarity.

The late Sam Moskowitz, the preeminent historian of science fiction, once offered this assessment: “In style, few match him. And the uniqueness of a story of Mars or Venus told in the contrasting literary rhythms of Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe is enough to fascinate any critic.”

As influenced by George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare as he was by Jules Verne and Edgar Rice

Bradbury the boy

Burroughs, Bradbury was an expert of the taut tale, the last-sentence twist. And he was more celebrated for short fiction than his longer works.

“It’s telling that we read Bradbury for his short stories,” said Benford. “They are glimpses. The most important thing about writers is how they exist in our memories. Having read Bradbury is like having seen a striking glimpse out of a car window and then being whisked away.”

An example is from 1957’s “Dandelion Wine”:

“The sidewalks were haunted by dust ghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up, swung them about and gentled them down in a warm spice on the lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strollers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed a volcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes everywhere, crusting slumberless night watchman and irritable dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spontaneous combustion at three in the morning.”

Bradbury’s poetically drawn and atmospheric fictions—horror, fantasy, shadowy American gothics—explored life’s secret corners: what was hidden in the margins of the official family narrative, or the white noise whirring uncomfortably just below the placid surface. He offered a set of metaphors and life puzzles to ponder for the rocket age and beyond, and has influenced a wide swath of popular culture–from children’s writer R.L. Stine and singer Elton John (who penned his hit “Rocket Man” as an homage), to architect Jon Jerde who enlisted Bradbury to consider and offer suggestions about reimagining public spaces.

Bradbury frequently attempted to shrug out of the narrow “sci-fi” designation, not because he was put off by it, but rather because he believed it was imprecise.

“I’m not a science fiction writer,” he was frequently quoted as saying. “I’ve written only one book of science fiction [“Fahrenheit 451″]. All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can’t happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.”

The following is an excellent video with Mr. Bradbury. It’s about an hour long. I highly recommend watching it. “An Evening with Ray Bradbury” 2001, from the 6th Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea.