The Stories of Ray Bradbury includes much of the best work from the short-fiction collections that established Bradbury’s literary reputation: The Illustrated Man (1951), The October Country (1955), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), and A Medicine for Melancholy (1959). First published at a time when fantasy and science fiction were separated from the literary mainstream as “popular fiction,” many of these stories helped draw attention to the way in which genre fiction could serve as a vehicle for the same themes and ideas found in so-called serious literature. Bradbury’s novels The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine (1957) both were assembled from short stories. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) each began as a short story before evolving into full-length novels.

Bradbury published little short fiction after The Stories of Ray Bradbury appeared, but some of his later novels—Death Is a Lonely Business (1985), A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (1990), and Green Shadows, White Whale (1992)—elaborate ideas first tackled in his short stories and show how the timeless themes of his earlier writing continue to shape his mature work.