Sam Weller is an American journalist and author, best known for his 2005 book The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury published by HarperCollins

HarperCollins

HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...

. In 2010, his book Listen to the Echoes, The Ray Bradbury Interviews was published by Melville House Publishing

Melville House Publishing

Melville House Publishing is an independent publisher of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. The company was founded in 2001 by the husband and wife team of Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians in Hoboken, New Jersey, a location Johnson jokingly called "the Left Bank" of New York City...

, a collection of interviews with Ray Bradbury including photos, mementos and artifacts.

Biography

Weller, born in Lake Forest, Illinois

Lake Forest, Illinois

Lake Forest is an affluent city located in Lake County, Illinois, United States. The city is south of Waukegan along the shore of Lake Michigan, and is a part of the Chicago metropolitan area and the North Shore. Lake Forest was founded around Lake Forest College and was laid out as a town in...

, has been a lifelong fan of fellow Illinois native Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...

. The genesis of his love for Mr. Bradbury's work has been described as the following:

Sam Weller familiarized himself with the words of Ray Bradbury even before he was born. During the infamous Chicago blizzard of January 1967, as drifting blankets of snow created white-out conditions in the Windy City, William Weller, Sam’s father, read Bradbury’s seminal classic, The Illustrated Man, aloud to his pregnant wife, Barbara. The baby, nine months in utero, turned and listened with keen interest…

This love, coupled with a journalist's tenacity, has led Weller to become Bradbury's only official biographer.

In addition to authoring books, Weller is the former Midwest Correspondent for Publisher's Weekly, former staff writer for the alternative weekly Newcity, a regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune Magazine, a regular literary critic for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and the now defunct Punk Planet magazine. He is also a contributing writer for the Chicago Public Radio program 848, and his work has appeared on the National Public Radio program All Things Considered. He is also a contributor to Playboy.com. Weller also lectures frequently on the life and works of Ray Bradbury.

Currently, in addition to his freelance writing, Weller is a full time faculty member of the Fiction Department at Columbia College Chicago

Columbia College Chicago

Columbia College Chicago is one of the largest art colleges in the United States with nearly 12,000 students pursuing degrees within 120 undergraduate and graduate programs...

. He lives in Chicago with his wife and daughters. He is currently at work on a historic narrative nonfiction mystery.