Dandelion Wine

As one of the recognized “Grand Masters” of American science fiction, fantasy, horror, and magical realism, Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) helped to popularize those genres during the mid-20th century. His lushly vivid and poetic writing style fills his stories with wonder, mystery, and terror. Perhaps Bradbury’s most famous novel is Fahrenheit 451, which describes a dystopian future in which the job of firefighters is not to put out fires, but to burn illegal books. That story and others by Bradbury have been adapted for TV, film, comic books, and stage productions.

Bradbury spent his earliest years in the small town of Waukegan, Illinois, and Dandelion Wine is largely based on those experiences. The book’s protagonist, Douglas, is inspired by Bradbury’s own boyhood eagerness to experience the daily wonders of life. In 1934, Bradbury’s father, searching for work during the Great Depression, took the family to Hollywood. Here, Bradbury continued his avid reading habits, was active in high school stage productions, roller-skated around town in search of autographs from movie stars, belonged to a sci-fi club, and wrote lots of stories. His works began to be published while he was still a teen.

College wasn’t an option for a working-class family during the Great Depression, so instead, Bradbury haunted the libraries for years. He credits them with his extensive education, and as a result, he led campaigns to save them, and championed libraries as sources of learning, especially for underprivileged youth.

Bradbury’s early literary idols included horror writer Edgar Allan Poe and early sci-fi adventure novelists like H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. He later read the speculative fiction of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and others, but he stopped reading science fiction, in part because he didn’t want other authors to influence his own writing.

In all, Bradbury wrote 11 novels, but his favorite form of writing was the short story, and throughout his career, he wrote enough of them to fill more than 50 collections. These publications include Dark Carnival, The October Country, The Machineries of Joy, and I Sing the Body Electric. Bradbury’s first published book, the 1950 novel The Martian Chronicles is a collection of connected short stories that has received extensive critical acclaim for its implied social commentary on the damaging effects of colonialism. The author used the technique of linked short stories, also called a “fixup,” with Dandelion Wine as well. Such an approach was not unique to Bradbury, for fellow science fiction writer Isaac Asimov also employed this format when writing I, Robot, and the Foundation trilogy in the 1950s. As two of the most important speculative fiction writers of the mid-20th century, both Bradbury and Asimov launched their writing careers in a similar fashion.

Throughout his lifetime, Bradbury won many awards and honors, including the US National Medal of Arts, an Emmy Award, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, multiple honors from major fantasy, horror, and sci-fi organizations, a Pulitzer lifetime achievement award, an asteroid named “9766 Bradbury,” a Mars rover landing site named “Bradbury Landing,” and a crater on the moon named Dandelion. Bradbury—who sometimes signed autographs with the words “Alive, alive, oh!”—was in his thirties when he wrote Dandelion Wine, but in some ways he anticipated his own future in the character of old Colonel Freeleigh, whose vivid recollections of his younger years serve as time machines into the past for the young boys in the story. Bradbury, too, died in his nineties, his own eloquent remembrances recorded in talks and set down in books—some of which, like Dandelion Wine, also serve as philosophical time machines that offer new generations a glimpse into a wondrous past.