In case you wondered …

… Dana Gioia on Why Ray Bradbury is So Essential. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What you see in American literature is a really interesting moment. You have a fellow who didn’t go to college. That’s probably the only reason that Bradbury was able to be this innovative; he just made it up on his own. He read the books that he wanted to in the order he wanted to, and he began to write children’s literature, which is to say, pulp science fiction. For ten years, ten of the most extraordinary years in the history of fantasy or science fiction, he wrote seven books—six of them are short story collections, one of them is a novel—in which, for the first time in American literature, somebody brought the subtlety and psychological insight of high culture fiction into science fiction without losing the imagination of science fiction.