his idea of Winesburg, Ohio. For his approach to integrating previous work into a novel, Bradbury credited Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as influences on the structure of the work. Winesburg, Ohio is a short story cycle, and The Grapes of Wrath separates narrative chapters with narrative expositions that serve as prologues to subsequent narrative chapters. The idea of using short vignettes, intercalary chapters, and expository narratives to connect the full-length Chronicle stories, their role in the overall work, and the literary style used to write them, Bradbury said were "subconsciously borrowed" from those in The Grapes of Wrath, which he first read at age nineteen, the year the novel was published. Reception Upon publication, The Paris Review noted that "The Martian Chronicles ... was embraced by the science-fiction community as well as critics, a rare achievement for the genre. Christopher Isherwood hailed Bradbury as 'truly original' and a 'very great and unusual talent'." Isherwood argued that Bradbury's works were "tales of the grotesque and arabesque" and compared them to the works of Edgar Allan Poe by writing, Bradbury "already deserves to be measured against the greatest master of his particular genre." Writer and critic Anthony Boucher and critic J. Francis McComas praised Chronicles as "a poet's interpretation of future history beyond the limits of any fictional form". The writer L. Sprague de Camp, however, declared that Bradbury would improve "when he escapes from the influence of Hemingway and Saroyan", placing him in "the tradition of anti-science-fiction writers [who] see no good in the machine age". Still, de Camp acknowledged that "[Bradbury's] stories have considerable emotional impact, and many will love them". A decade of after its publication, Damon Knight in his "Books" column for F&SF, listed The Martian Chronicles on his top-ten science fiction books of the 1950s. By September 1979 more than three million copies of The Martian Chronicles had been sold. Legacy Continued popularity of The Martian Chronicles On November 28, 1964, the NASA spacecraft Mariner 4 flew by Mars and took the first close-up pictures of the Martian surface that were far different than those described by Ray Bradbury. In spite of direct visual and scientific information since then that indicate Mars is nothing like Bradbury's descriptions in The Martian Chronicles, the novel remains a popular work of "classic short stories", "science fiction", and "classic fiction anthologies and collections" as