In comments elsewhere, referencing Ray Bradbury's feud with Michael Moore over the title of Moore's latest movie, I said the following:
This only just occurred to me tonight in a dinner conversation, but I've come up with a better example than any cited in the Washington Post letter for why Ray Bradbury is full of prunes.
Every title Annie Hudson cited is a title borrowed directly from another author's text. That's not the case with Fahrenheit 9/11, which is a play on the title of a Bradbury work. But has Bradbury ever written a book that plays on the title of someone else's book?
Consider his 1992 fixup novel Green Shadows, White Whale, which is a lightly fictionalized account of the young Bradbury's sojourn in Ireland working on the screenplay for the John Huston movie Moby Dick. Compare it with the Peter Viertel novel White Hunter, Black Heart, which was published in the '50s and which presented a lightly fictionalized account of Viertel's experiences in Africa working on the screenplay for the John Huston movie The African Queen.
Now come on. Under Bradbury's own logic, he's an asshole and Viertel should be kicking his ass from here to Mozambique.
I wanted to add that I would never have heard of Viertel's novel in the first place if Clint Eastwood hadn't made it into a movie in 1990, casting himself in the John Huston role. It's a movie that falls just short of greatness but is still worth watching. Better, in my memory anyway, than the overwrought Mystic River.
