“I have rifled the poor man’s underwear drawer,” says Sam Weller, biographer of Ray Bradbury. “Such is the invasive snooping endemic to the role of the biographer. Along with the BVDs and the boxer shorts, I’ve combed his tax records, gone through his lineage with the precision of an OCD-addled genealogist, and I’ve clocked, oh, about 500 hours of audio recordings of our intimate, far-ranging and often wildly tangential conversations.”

All that, to put together Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews, about to be released by Melville House under its Stop Smiling line. In a commentary for Time Out Chicago, Weller discusses how he set about being THE biographer of such a giant writer. As he notes,

For the last decade I have worked to document Ray Bradbury’s life story. Most people know Bradbury by his 1953 chef d’oeuvre, Fahrenheit 451, a dystopic staple of middle-school reading lists. But his résumé also includes no less notable literary feats as The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man and Dandelion Wine …

Ten years is a long haul. The term that comes to mind is immersion journalism. For just more than a decade now, I have spent a truly unprecedented amount of time with a man recently hailed by Slate.com as “The Mythologist of Our Age.” His stories have, without question, seeped into our collective consciousness.

So what was it like,after all, to work with Ray Bradbury for ten years? Several things come to Weller’s mind, most notably that it was …

Weird. On November 17, 2004, we went to the White House. Bradbury was given the Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush. Afterward, drinking copious taxpayer-funded white wine in the East Room, VP Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne, told me that she dreamt the night before that she visited Mars. You don’t say….).