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The Fruit at the bottom of the Bowl

by Ray Bradbury

Read the Book PDF: The Fruit at the bottom of the Bowl

This week in the Tales from the Library Book Club we will be reading 'The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl' by Ray Bradbury. 'The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl' is a short story by Ray Bradbury. It was first published in Detective Book Magazine in November 1948 as 'Touch and Go'. The story was re-titled and published in EQMM in January 1953. 

Mr. Acton begins the story standing over the body of Mr. Huxley, whom he has just killed. While attempting to cover up his tracks, he has flashbacks of his encounters with Mr. Huxley, with whom he is having an altercation over a woman. These flashbacks reveal to the murderer that there are more and more of his fingerprints all over the man's house. Mr Acton becomes incresingly obsessed with cleaning the house and making sure that there can be no trace of him left...

An interestingly macabre story, that has a twist of Bradburys darkly comic style, not disimilar to that of a Roald Dahl story. The story speaks of death, crime, justice, obsession, lust, jelousy and much more. What did you think?

You can also watch this story as a Ray Bradbury theatre telivison production: The Fruit at the bottom of the Bowl

About the Author

Ray Douglas Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947.

His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended consequences. Next came The Illustrated Man and then, in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, which many consider to be Bradbury's masterpiece, a scathing indictment of censorship set in a future world where the written word is forbidden. In an attempt to salvage their history and culture, a group of rebels memorize entire works of literature and philosophy as their books are burned by the totalitarian state. Other works include The October Country, Dandelion Wine, A Medicine for Melancholy, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric!, Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. In all, Bradbury has published more than thirty books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, and plays. His short stories have appeared in more than 1,000 school curriculum "recommended reading" anthologies.

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