Dandelion Wine
Dust-jacket from the first edition
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| Author | Ray Bradbury |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
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Publication date
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1946 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 281 pp |
| ISBN | (reprint) |
| OCLC | 18280204 |
| Followed by | Farewell Summer |
Dandelion Wine is a 1957 novel by Ray Bradbury, taking place in the summer of 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois, based upon Bradbury's childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois. The novel developed from the short story "Dandelion Wine" which appeared in the June 1953 issue of Gourmet magazine.
The title refers to a wine made with dandelion petals and other ingredients, commonly citrus fruit. In the story, dandelion wine, as made by the protagonist's grandfather, serves as a metaphor for packing all of the joys of summer into a single bottle.
The main character of the story is Douglas Spaulding, a 12-year-old boy loosely patterned after Bradbury. Most of the book is focused upon the routines of small-town America, and the simple joys of yesterday.
Bradbury noted in "Just This Side of Byzantium", a 1974 essay used as an introduction to the book, Dandelion Wine is a recreation of a boy's childhood, based upon an intertwining of Bradbury's own experiences and imagination.
Farewell Summer, the official sequel to Dandelion Wine, was published in October 2006. While Farewell Summer is a direct continuation of the plot of Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, a novel with a completely different plot and characters, is often paired with the latter because of their stylistic and thematic similarities. Together, the three novels form a Green Town trilogy. A fourth volume, Summer Morning, Summer Night, published in 2008, contains twenty-seven Green Town stories and vignettes, seventeen of which had never been published before.
Dandelion Wine is a series of short stories loosely connected to summer occurrences, with Douglas and his family as recurring characters. Many of the chapters were first published as individual short stories, the earliest being The Night (1946), with the remainder appearing between 1950 and 1957. For chapters which began as short stories, their original titles are given in parentheses below.
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