A Graveyard for Lunatics

Abstract

Chapter 27 describes the development and publication of A Graveyard for Lunatics, Bradbury’s second exercise in sustained autobiographical fiction within a five-year span. If Death Is a Lonely Business had explored the late 1940s moment when he overcame his fear of losing his creativity, A Graveyard for Lunatics focused on the period in the 1950s and early 1960s when he realized that he must not be swallowed up by his love of writing for Hollywood. Bradbury knew that he would lose all the future stories he would ever write if he assumed the secure but anonymous life of a screenwriter, working only with the works of other writers. The resulting fantasy offered an effective satire of the Hollywood studio system.