Ray Bradbury Trivia
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137 free Ray Bradbury trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Ray Bradbury trivia quiz covers the writer who carried science fiction into the literary mainstream, from his Waukegan childhood to the Mars rover landing site that bears his name. The easy questions handle Fahrenheit 451's fireman, the Shakespeare line behind Something Wicked This Way Comes, the dinosaur in 'A Sound of Thunder' and the fact that Bradbury never learned to drive. From there it moves into the stories themselves: the eight-legged Mechanical Hound, the nursery in 'The Veldt', the house that keeps announcing the date in 'There Will Come Soft Rains' and the British title of The Martian Chronicles. The harder end is for people who have read past the syllabus: the fanzine that printed his first story, the future novelist who fished 'Homecoming' out of a slush pile, the magazine that serialised Fahrenheit 451, the Hollywood star who was supposed to direct Something Wicked, and the $9.80 typewriter bill behind his most famous novel. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Bradbury and his individual books, stories and adaptations, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our science fiction, classic novels and Twilight Zone quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 137 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Illinois town was Ray Bradbury born in 1920?
Waukegan
Waukegan stayed with him long after the family left for Los Angeles in 1934: he spent decades rebuilding its porches, fireflies and golden late afternoons in his fiction.
Q 02Bradbury's parents gave him his middle name in honour of which swashbuckling silent-film star?
Douglas Fairbanks
Douglas Fairbanks supplied the middle name of Ray Douglas Bradbury, who handed it on to Douglas Spaulding, the 12-year-old hero he modelled on himself.
Q 03Which carnival magician tapped 12-year-old Bradbury with a sword and told him to 'Live forever!'?
Mr. Electrico
By Bradbury's account, Mr. Electrico sat in an electric chair with sparks running through him; the next day he told the boy they had been friends in an earlier life, and within days Bradbury began to write.
Q 04At 14, Bradbury talked his way into which radio comedian's broadcasts and saw one of his own jokes used on air?
George Burns
George Burns let the boy in as his audience outside a Figueroa Street theatre; Bradbury came back every Wednesday with scripts for Burns and Allen, and one of his gags closed a show.
Q 05Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on rented typewriters in a basement typing room at which university?
UCLA
UCLA had a basement typing room where a dime bought half an hour; Bradbury went there to escape a small house and the distractions of two young children.
Q 06Roughly how much did Bradbury spend on typewriter rental to write Fahrenheit 451?
$9.80
$9.80 in dimes covered it: the typewriters cost ten cents per half-hour, so, as he put it, 'you'd type like hell', and the first draft was done in nine days.
Q 07According to Bradbury, who told him that book paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit?
A Los Angeles fire chief
A Los Angeles fire chief gave him the figure by phone after other calls drew blanks: he left the line for a moment and came back with '451'. 'I hope he wasn't lying to me,' Bradbury said.
Q 08Fahrenheit 451 grew out of which 1951 novella Bradbury published in Galaxy Science Fiction?
The Fireman
The Fireman ran to about 25,000 words in Galaxy's February 1951 issue; Ballantine's Stanley Kauffmann urged him to double it, and he went back to the same typing room to do so.
Q 09In Fahrenheit 451, Montag's wife Mildred is obsessed with the 'family' she watches on what?
Giant parlor-wall screens
Giant parlor-wall screens cover three walls of the Montags' living room, and when Montag talks of leaving his job Mildred panics at the thought of losing the house and her on-screen 'family'.
Q 10In Fahrenheit 451, who is the free-spirited teenage neighbour who makes Montag question his life?
Clarisse McClellan
Clarisse McClellan asks Montag whether he is happy, then vanishes; in the 1966 film Julie Christie played both her and Montag's wife, casting Bradbury later called a mistake.
Q 11In Fahrenheit 451, what eight-legged machine lives in the firehouse?
The Hound
The Hound, a mechanical tracker, can be set to follow any scent; when it finally catches Montag it jabs his leg with an anaesthetic needle before he destroys it with a flamethrower.
Q 12In Fahrenheit 451, whom does Montag turn his flamethrower on after being ordered to burn his own house?
Captain Beatty
Captain Beatty, Montag's boss, was once an avid reader and still quotes the books he burns; Montag later decides Beatty wanted to die, having goaded him while handing him the weapon.
Q 13Faber, the retired professor who helps Montag in Fahrenheit 451, gives him what?
A homemade earpiece
Q 21What does a Martian Chronicles settler sow to thicken the air?
Trees
Trees: in 'The Green Morning' Benjamin Driscoll, who can barely breathe on Mars, plants seeds and is stunned to find a full-grown forest standing there the next morning.
Q 22Which title, echoing a chapter about settlers arriving in their thousands, did British publishers give The Martian Chronicles?
The Silver Locusts
The Silver Locusts, the 1951 British edition, also changed what was inside: in some printings 'The Fire Balloons' was added and 'Usher II' dropped to make room.
Q 23A chance meeting with which British expatriate writer got The Martian Chronicles to a respected critic?
Christopher Isherwood
A homemade earpiece lets the old professor hear everything and whisper advice from home, until Montag's boss finds it and vows to trace the voice at the other end.
Q 14Which book of the Bible does Montag realise he has partly memorised at the end of Fahrenheit 451?
Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes is the book Montag carries in his head, with a little of Revelation; each exile keeps one book in memory so that it can be written down again when the burning stops.
Q 15Fahrenheit 451 was serialised in 1954 in which magazine?
Playboy
Playboy, only a few months old, took the novel after it had already come out as a book and ran it in three parts in its March, April and May 1954 issues.
Q 16Which French New Wave director filmed Fahrenheit 451 in 1966?
François Truffaut
François Truffaut made it his first colour film and his only one in English; he kept a diary of the shoot and called it his saddest and most difficult, mainly over clashes with his leading man.
Q 17Who played Montag in the 1966 film of Fahrenheit 451?
Oskar Werner
Oskar Werner got the part after Terence Stamp, already cast, pulled out for fear of being overshadowed by Julie Christie's double role; Werner then feuded with his director throughout.
Q 18Who starred as Montag in the 2018 television film of Fahrenheit 451?
Michael B. Jordan
Michael B. Jordan was also an executive producer; Ramin Bahrani's version moves the story to Cleveland and makes Canada, where no books are burned, the place the rebels' hopes are pinned on.
Q 19Bradbury said he wrote Fahrenheit 451 about Hitler, Mussolini and which other dictator?
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, in which writers and poets were arrested and often killed, haunted him alongside the Nazi bonfires; 'I didn't write Fahrenheit 451 about us,' Bradbury said.
Q 20Half a century on, Fahrenheit 451 won a 'Retro' edition of which award?
Hugo
The Hugo Award was not handed out at the 1954 convention, so voters in 2004 filled the gap with 'Retro Hugos' and named Fahrenheit 451 the best novel of its year.
The encounter happened in a Los Angeles bookstore, and Isherwood's enthusiasm helped lift Bradbury out of the pulps.
Q 24Who starred as Colonel Wilder in the 1980 NBC miniseries of The Martian Chronicles?
Rock Hudson
Rock Hudson led the three-night NBC production, scripted by Richard Matheson and shot in Malta and Lanzarote; Bradbury's own verdict on the result was 'just boring'.
Q 25Bradbury's story 'There Will Come Soft Rains' takes its title from a poem by which writer?
Sara Teasdale
Sara Teasdale's 1918 poem says no bird or tree would mind 'if mankind perished utterly'; in the story a house reads it aloud to a mistress who is no longer there to hear it.
Q 26In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', what finally destroys the automated house that has outlived its family?
A fire
A fire starts when wind sends a tree branch through the kitchen window; the house fights it all night and loses, and one wall is left standing, still announcing the date.
Q 27In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', what trace of the vanished family is left on the house's outer wall?
Burned-in silhouettes
Burned-in silhouettes mark where the family stood outdoors when the bomb fell on Allendale; inside, the house still cooks their breakfast and calls them to the table.
Q 28In The Illustrated Man, what do the drifter's tattoos do?
Come alive
Come alive, one at a time: each tattoo stirs and plays out one of the book's stories, the device Bradbury uses to bind a set of unrelated tales into a single volume.
Q 29Which actor starred in The Illustrated Man, the 1969 film of Bradbury's book?
Rod Steiger
Rod Steiger took the title role for a director he had known since the 1950s; the film kept only three of the book's stories, and Bradbury was not consulted on the script.
Q 30In Bradbury's tale of the Hadleys' automated Happylife Home, which landscape does the nursery keep conjuring?
An African grassland
An African grassland, the veldt of the title, fills the nursery with lions; when the parents decide to switch the room off, the children lock them inside with the pride.