Ray Bradbury and the Busty Origins of Fire

In 1947, Bradbury wrote a short story titled "Bright Phoenix" (later revised for publication in a 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction).Bradbury later expanded the basic premise of "Bright Phoenix" into The Fireman, a novella published in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. A few months later, the novel was serialized in the March, April, and May 1954 issues of Playboy.

Bradbury wrote the entire novel in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library on a pay typewriter that he rented for a fee of ten cents per half an hour.

It's poetic that a quintessential book about the decline of literacy would be confined by rental fees and initially published in a soft-core porn mag.

Playboy has a respectable list of subsequent articles and stories published. Joyce Carol Oates, Roald Dahl, Norman Mailer, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, and a many others have published awardwinning material in the magazine. Yes, people do buy Playboy for the articles. Not that Playboy lacks filler content otherwise.

This was the cover for the May 1954 issue that included the first installment of Farenheit 451.