Bradbury and Modernity

This chapter examines how Ray Bradbury's disillusionment with modernity led him to take on Modernist themes such as isolation, alienation, the loss of values, and the decline of traditional sources of wisdom. Bradbury's early work on the Illinois novel coincided with the development of two novel concepts that would not reach print in any form for sixty years: Masks and Where Ignorant Armies Clash By Night. Behind the scenes of his award-winning success with major market magazines, Bradbury's own search for a writing identity in long fiction moved for a time beyond the psychological novel he was writing about his Illinois youth. This chapter considers Bradbury's development of Masks as a second psychological novel project beginning in April 1946 and the ways it differed from the psychological underpinnings of the Illinois novel. It also discusses how Where Ignorant Armies Clash By Night led to Fahrenheit 451 and how one set of its page fragments evolved into a published story as “The Smile” (1952).