A whole boyhood summer, bottled, to be drunk slowly.
Dandelion Wine
In a small Illinois town, a twelve-year-old discovers he's alive—and begins to understand that the summer won't last forever.
181g
Weighs the same as Banana
- Lightweight
- Carries You Away
- Fiction
Oh to be a 12-year-old realizing that he is alive, and what that means. Ray Bradbury captured it in a small town in Illinois, in the summer of 1928. The trivial summer things that became formative (new sneakers, the last trolley of the season, the porch swing) burn like effervescent sparklers. Bradbury writes joy and dread into the same breath, and it goes down like its titular beverage: a bit sweet, but with something dark at the bottom of the glass. A whole boyhood summer, bottled — drink it slowly.
Field notes
Bradbury spent more than a decade transforming memories of his Illinois childhood into stories, many published separately before being gathered into Dandelion Wine. His original manuscript was much larger; the material left out eventually became Farewell Summer, published nearly fifty years later. The book's episodic structure preserves something of those separate beginnings, as though each story were another bottle laid away against winter.