For Electric Literature, Henry Stewart examines the coming of age stories of Ray Bradbury. In addition to comparing Bradbury’s “boy’s boys” to characters in works by Mark Twain and James Agee, Stewart draws parallels between Bradbury’s novels and the author’s biography. What he finds is that Bradbury’s characters’ fascination with “inevitable, inexorable death,” may be related to deaths witnessed in Bradbury’s youth:
The death of children, seems to exist in Bradbury’s subconscious as a metaphorical motif… It’s not the children dying but childhood itself—the metamorphosis of a man that haunts his aged self, reminding him of his impending cessation.
