Burn it,' snaps Beatty, the fire chief, to Guy Montag, the troubled protagonist of 'Fahrenheit 451' - a number representing the temperature at which books go from paper to ash. 'A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. His most famous book, 'Fahrenheit 451' (1953), is a cautionary tale about the insidious creep of censorship its sinister evocation of a world in the maybe-not-so-distant future in which firefighters are employed to burn books is startlingly plausible. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, 'Take me home!'' (Full disclosure, one of this critic's works is part of 'Shadow Show,' an upcoming collection celebrating Bradbury.) In his long life, he was many things, including a warrior for freedom. 'I was always yelling and running somewhere. In what we now know will be among his final published works, an essay in the current issue of The New Yorker, Bradbury recalled his excitement when first encountering science fiction: 'It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another,' he wrote. A writer, he advised, 'should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms,' ready to embrace 'the fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard.' That fire was kindled early in the lakefront village north of Chicago. 'How did I get from Waukegan, Illinois, to Red Planet, Mars?' was how he began an essay in his collection 'Zen in the Art of Writing' (1990).

He was a wildly prolific and yet sternly disciplined writer, a yarn-spinner in love with words and with the vigor required to craft them into narratives. His magnificent and captivating stories about intergalactic travel, about life on other planets, about future worlds and past ones, too, including his own small-town upbringing in a place that always seemed to be a lovingly rendered version of Waukegan, came bubbling forth from him. The kid from Waukegan, whose leaps of imagination enabled him to go higher and further than any other writer of his generation, died Tuesday in Los Angeles at 91. And unlike Gagarin, he took the rest of us along for the ride. The history books say that Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space, but the history books are wrong.

The rocket man ray bradbury