Dandelion Wine
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- For the Australian musical duo see Dandelion Wine (band).
The title refers to a wine made with the petals of the Dandelion flower 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. As Bradbury writes 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 actual experiences and his unique imagination.
Most of the book is focused upon the routines of small-town America, and the simple joys of yesteryear. The story is not traditional science-fiction, but there is a sequence about an inventor that creates a device that allows the user to mentally travel to any place and time in the world.
Almost all 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 For several decades, Bradbury has worked on an unpublished sequel, Farewell Summer, about a war between the young and the old in Green Town, set in October 1929. The first chapter, also titled Farewell Summer, was published in The Stories of Ray Bradbury. With Something Wicked This Way Comes, the three novels form a Green Town trilogy.
Bradbury wrote a stage adaptation of Dandelion Wine in 1988.
In 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts named a moon crater "Dandelion Crater" for Bradbury's novel.
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