Tom Spaulding: Douglas' younger brother, Tom is the more logical and skeptical one, often questioning his brother's seemingly inexplicable actions. Bradbury has stated that Douglas is based on the childhood version of him, and in fact, 'Douglas' is Bradbury's actual middle name, while 'Spaulding' is his father's middle name. Most of the time, he aims to have fun as a 12-year-old kid, but sometimes he lapses into philosophical brooding on topics, including life and death, more mature topics than what would be expected of his age. Douglas is imaginative, fanciful, and occasionally meditative on the state of the world. Many of the chapters were first published as individual short stories, the earliest being The Night (1946), with the remainder appearing between 19.ĭouglas Spaulding: The protagonist of the novel, the entire summer is seen mostly through his eyes as a time of joys and sorrows. Plot introduction ĭandelion Wine is a series of short stories loosely connected to summer occurrences, with Douglas and his family as recurring characters. 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. Together, the three novels form a Green Town trilogy. 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. Most of the book is focused upon the routines of small-town America, and the simple joys of yesterday.īradbury noted in 'Just This Side of Byzantium', a 1974 essay used as an introduction to the book, that Dandelion Wine is a recreation of a boy's childhood, based upon an intertwining of Bradbury's own experiences and imagination.įarewell Summer, the official sequel to Dandelion Wine, was published in October 2006. The main character of the story is Douglas Spaulding, a 12-year-old boy loosely patterned after Bradbury. 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 title refers to a wine made with dandelion petals and other ingredients, commonly citrus fruit. The novel developed from the short story 'Dandelion Wine', which appeared in the June 1953 issue of Gourmet magazine. Dandelion Wine is a 1957 novel by Ray Bradbury set in the summer of 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois, based upon Bradbury's childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois.

The book dandelion wine