Where Are They Buried? (50 page)

Bradbury’s books, multi-layered and ambitious, offered a set of metaphors and life puzzles to ponder for the rocket age and beyond, and established him as an author of particular insight. He stood apart from other science-fiction authors in that he was far less concerned with the typical mechanics of, say, how many tanks of fuel it might take to get to a distant world or what type of rocket would be used; instead he urged his readers to consider the consequences of their actions. “I’m not a futurist. People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it,” he said. He was hardly the first science-fiction writer to represent science and technology as a mixed bag of blessings and abominations, but Bradbury differed from his contemporaries in that he eliminated the technical jargon for which mass audiences had no patience and packaged his troubling speculations about the future in an appealing blend of poetic metaphors. That subtle turn helped Bradbury step over the threshold from genre writer to mainstream visionary. But not everyone was pleased with his success—he lost standing among science-fiction purists who complained about his cavalier attitude toward scientific facts, some even going so far as to label him as “anti-science.”

It seems the purists had a point because, though his dozens of books and 600 short stories predicted everything from ATMs to live broadcasts of fugitive car chases, he was actually reserved and cautious of scientific breakthroughs. With very strong opinions about what the future had become, he feared that in the drive to make their lives smart and efficient, humans had lost touch with their souls. Content to restrict his own adventures to the realm of imagination, he never even learned to drive and kept up his thousand-word-a-day writing schedule on an electric typewriter long after technology had passed it by. He long maligned computers and hated the Internet. Saying that e-books “smell like burned fuel,” he refused to allow electronic versions of his works, only relenting on that point in what turned out to be the last year of his life. Instead, he lived to sniff the roses and, approachable and animated, could often be spotted out and about, a familiar figure with a wind-blown mane of white hair and heavy black-framed
glasses browsing the stacks of bookstores, his bicycle leaning against a pole just outside.

Though his books became a staple of high school and college English courses, Bradbury himself disdained formal education and went so far as to attribute his success as a writer to his never having gone to college. “I’m an idea writer. I have fun with ideas and I play with them,” he explained. “I’m not a serious person, and I don’t like serious people.” He added, “My goal is to entertain myself and others.”

Credited with saying, “The problem with death is it’s so damn permanent,” Bradbury went to his permanence at 91, while asleep at his home. He is buried at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
This little cemetery holds numerous celebrities and is peculiarly located behind the office complex at 10850 Wilshire Boulevard, just about a half-mile east of I-405.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn left at the office, walk into the Garden of Serenity adjacent to the chapel on the right and there you’ll see Bradbury’s memorial stone.

JUNE 26, 1892 – MARCH 5, 1973

Born to Southern Presbyterian missionaries, Pearl S. Buck was taken to China at the age of three months and lived there for 40 years. She became intimately familiar with the daily lives of China’s poorest inhabitants, and the village where she lived provided the primary setting for her first stories, including her novel
The Good Earth
. Loved by millions of readers since its publication in 1931, it was one of the most popular novels of the twentieth century, won a Pulitzer Prize, and was made into an Oscar-winning film.

But Pearl’s ambitions weren’t sated by mere success as a bestselling author. Upon her return to the United States, she was compelled to write and speak out on behalf of various humanitarian concerns and was active in campaigns for civil rights, the equal rights amendment, a nuclear test ban, and the improvement of international relations. She also worked on the problems of handicapped children and orphans, and raised millions of dollars for medical relief in China. Pearl established herself as one of the most influential women of the twentieth century and left a legacy far larger than her writings.

At 80, she died of cancer and was buried at her Green Hills Farm Estate in Dublin, Pennsylvania.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Green Hills Farm is located on Dublin Avenue, the country road that runs for three miles between Dublin and Hillside, Pennsylvania. Along the road is a narrow stone bridge, and the farm is located just south of this bridge.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the farm’s main driveway and after about a hundred yards is a small paved pullout on the right. Stop and park here. Across the drive, follow the paved walk a short distance to Pearl’s grave under an ash tree. She chose the grave site herself and her tombstone, which she designed, does not record her name in English; instead, the Chinese characters representing the name Pearl Sydenstricker are inscribed.

Green Hills Farm is now a National Historic Landmark and houses the international offices of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. The work of the privately sponsored foundation is to assist Amerasian children in their native countries, particularly abandoned offspring fathered by American servicemen stationed overseas.

MARCH 6, 1475 – FEBRUARY 18, 1564

As a sculptor, architect, and painter, Michelangelo was one of the most inspired creators in the history of art. He was the
most potent force of the Italian High Renaissance, and his expressive use of the idealized human form had a tremendous impact on subsequent Western art.

Though Michelangelo spent the greater part of his adulthood employed by the popes in Rome, he was a Florentine art prodigy who, by fifteen, was living in the ruling Medici palace, with Lorenzo de Medici acting as his sole patron. Lorenzo died in 1492, and when the French invaded under Charles VII two years later, Michelangelo fled Florence and eventually landed in Rome.

There, Michelangelo quickly returned to his art and by 1498 his reputation was cemented with the completion of a magnificently sculpted Pietà (a representation of Mary’s mourning over Christ’s body), which now stands in Saint Peter’s Cathedral. Word of his talent spread and Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1501 to sculpt the marble
David
that now flanks the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio. Upon
David’s
completion, Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo again to Rome to begin work on his tomb, which the master considered to be the low point of his career; by fits and starts, a scaled-down version of the colossally egoistic original was completed 40 years later.

While the tomb was in its early stages, Julius also commissioned Michelangelo to decorate the ceiling of the chief Vatican chapel, the Sistine. This would prove to be his masterpiece. Michelangelo and perhaps a half-dozen subordinates began the work in 1508 but, almost immediately, dissatisfied with his assistants’ inability to meet his evolving demands, he sent them away and completed the monumental task single-handedly over the next four years. In a 1510 sonnet entitled “On Painting the Sistine Chapel Ceiling,” Michelangelo offered a poignant account of his grueling task, painting while bent over backwards: “My belly’s pushed by force beneath my chin, My beard toward Heaven, I feel the back of my brain.”

By 1516 Florence was again under Medici power and Michelangelo again returned, working there intermittently on a number of projects until 1534, when he left Florence for the last time, settling in Rome. The first five years back in Rome were largely spent on the huge
Last Judgment
altarpiece painting for the Sistine Chapel, and over the next five years he finally finished the tomb of Julius II (who, by then, had been dead some 30 years).

Next, Pope Paul III appointed Michelangelo to take over the architectural design of Saint Peter’s Cathedral, an enormous
church with a huge central dome surrounded by a series of secondary structures. By the time Michelangelo died, a considerable part of Saint Peter’s had been built, and it stands today as testimony to his grand vision. He died at 89, and though the Pope desired his body to be buried in Saint Peter’s, Michelangelo had left instructions that he rest in Florence. His body was interred there, in the church of Santa Croce, and may be visited whenever the church is open.

NOVEMBER 7, 1913 – JANUARY 4, 1960

In 1938 the selective thinker and writer Albert Camus relocated from his Algerian homeland to France. History there overtook him, and he joined the resistance movement against Nazi occupation as a standout underground journalist. In the midst of the carnage that ravaged France in 1942, Camus put out his enigmatic novella
The Stranger
, his most hard-boiled work and the one for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature fifteen years later. In this product of a five-year effort, Camus rendered his doctrine that the inevitability of death renders human life ultimately meaningless. Further, the individual cannot make rational sense of his life experience and is an insignificant victim of the absurd orthodoxy of habit.

In 1947, concluding that his journalistic activities were a response to the demands of the time, he retired from newspapers to concentrate on his fiction and essays. For the most part, Camus’ later works were a continuation of his stringent search for moral order, and he expounded upon his philosophies most notably in
The Plague
and
The Rebel
. In 1970 the unfinished novel
La Mort Heureuse
was published posthumously, in which Camus succinctly announced, “All that matters really, is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest is nothing but excuses.”

In the winter of 1960, Camus was traveling to Paris in the front seat of a Facel-Vega sports car driven by his publisher, Michel Gallimard, whose wife and daughter were in the back. Thirty miles south of Paris, near a village named Petit Villemomble, the car slid off the wet road and hit a tree. Camus’ neck was broken and he died instantly.

At 46, he was buried at Lourmarin Cemetery in Lourmarin, France, 30 miles north of Marseilles.

SEPTEMBER 30, 1924 – AUGUST 25, 1984

DIED NOVEMBER 15, 1959

Born Truman Streckfus Persons to a sixteen-year-old beauty queen, Truman Capote was to become one of America’s most controversial authors, partly due to his literary works, but perhaps even more as a result of his flair for publicity, his hunger for malicious gossip, and interest in his flamboyant lifestyle.

As a child, Truman was shuttled among a variety of relatives and, for a time, lived in Monroeville, Alabama. A close childhood friend there was none other than fair-haired tomboy Harper Lee, who in 1961 would become the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Truman and Harper were inseparable—the entrepreneurial Truman charged other neighborhood children a nickel to use Harper’s swimming pool—and she later modeled one of
Mockingbird’s
central characters, Dill Harris, on Truman.

After a stint with the
New Yorker
magazine, Truman established himself as a serious author for his frank discussion of homosexuality in
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, and the provocative picture of himself on its cover stirred the gay community. In the 1950s, Truman’s literary works lifted him to celebrity status, and he was the newest wonder boy of the jet set, a fixture of chic parties, and a notorious philanderer. For this, Truman was accused of frivolity, and his stock response—“I’m researching my next book”—was supported in 1958 by the release of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, a sensational account of high society. The overwhelming success enjoyed by the book, as well as its celebrated 1961 film adaptation, assured Truman’s position in the upper crust.

But Truman wasn’t done yet. He became intrigued with the idea of writing a new kind of book, one that would blend journalism and fictional techniques to a previously untested degree and, in fact, Truman was looking toward a new art form—the “nonfiction novel.” In November 1959 he read a small news item about the deaths of the Clutters, a Kansas family who were systematically and savagely murdered by point-blank shotgun blasts to the head, and decided he had found his ideal subject. Just three days after the murders, he traveled to Kansas and began a six-year, all-consuming writing project about the case. His intensive research
included hours of interviews with the two killers, who were tried, convicted, and eventually executed.

Upon its release, the chilling masterpiece
In Cold Blood
was an instant success and won Truman glowing reviews, a good deal of money, a swarm of imitators, and an even greater measure of celebrity. He swiftly moved to his next novel,
Answered Prayers
, which was to be a bitingly honest portrayal of his high-flying world, but in 1975 when its first few chapters were released in
Esquire
magazine, a major scandal erupted. Truman had been too honest. He did “what people always tell writers to do, but [he] didn’t wait till they were dead to do it.”