ABSTRACT
Beginning in 1944 with his short story “The Lake,” Ray Bradbury found that he could generate vivid and original stories by drawing from his memories of childhood in Waukegan in 1920s and early 1930s. Bradbury’s parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all lived within a mile of one another, providing the reassurance of a close-knit and loving family, as well as encouragement to his creative imagination. Throughout his life, however, Bradbury was haunted by a fear of death and loss. His fear was fueled from an early age by intimate experience with family mortality, such as the home deaths of his paternal grandfather, infant sister, and toddler brother. Rather than be paralyzed by his fears, the adult Bradbury rendered painful childhood recollections manageable psychologically by recasting his remembered family members and hometown into fictions that he could control. Bradbury brought deceased loved ones back to life as characters in his stories, and in his more gothic tales, Bradbury literally resurrected them by supernatural devices. His Bradbury and Moberg kin, for instance, became the Elliott family, a clan of vampires, witches, and monsters, and his paternal grandparents’ home became the Elliotts’ haunted house. By transforming them into supernatural beings, Bradbury placed his family beyond the reach of death. This chapter seeks to elucidate the motives and processes for Bradbury’s creation of the Elliott family by analyzing these stories in the historic context of his childhood and family life in a small Midwestern town.
