Witness and Celebrate

Chapter five surveys the poems and musical experiments that both distracted Bradbury from story writing and renewed his creativity in the early 1970s. Television and film composer Lalo Schifrin put Bradbury’s Madrigals for the Space Age to music just as Bradbury’s accelerating output of poems led to the first of three volumes of verse with his trade publisher Alfred A. Knopf. His defiant articles on the termination of the Apollo lunar missions culminated in his December 1972 Playboy article, “From Stonehenge to Tranquility Base,” a title image meant to convey the all-too-brief period of human history devoted to reaching the heavens. Chapter five concludes with unsuccessful attempts by the United States government to negotiate a cultural exchange for Bradbury with the Soviet Union.