Ray Bradbury was an accomplished author who wrote many acclaimed works during his life, such as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. He was born on August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, where he enjoyed a peaceful childhood. He would later use this setting for some of the short stories he wrote. In the year after he graduated high school, Bradbury self-published a science fiction magazine called Futuria Fantasia, cementing his goal of being a successful science fiction writer in stone. Bradbury continued to write voraciously, publishing Dark Carnival, a small collection of short stories he wrote, in 1947. Later on, he published The Martian Chronicles in 1950, his first major work and the one that showed the public how well he wrote