By his early thirties, Ray Bradbury had established himself as one of the luminaries of science fiction, but his ambitions and interests were already leading him to abandon the formulas of genre storytelling. Around this time, he began crafting a series of stories inspired by his childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, where Bradbury had spent most of the first fourteen years of his life. This careful mining of the modest and uneventful happenings of his own youth would eventually result in several books, and numerous short stories.
Just as surprising were the periodicals where Ray Bradbury was now publishing these Illinois stories. "The Season of Sitting" appeared in Charm —which positioned itself as "the magazine for the business girl"—in August 1951; "The Lawns of Summer" was published in Nation’s Business in May 1952; "Dandelion Wine" found a home in the June 1953 issue of Gourmet ; "The Swan" was featured in Cosmopolitan in September 1954; and the illustrious Saturday Evening Post accepted "Summer in the Air" and ran it in its February 1956 issue. The author who had cut his teeth on Weird Tales had clearly moved into a better literary neighborhood.
These efforts reached their culmination in Bradbury’s ambitions for a big "Waukegan novel," which he sent to his publisher at the end of 1956. Years later, the writer’s wife Maggie would mention that Dandelion Wine was Bradbury’s favorite among his books—although the author himself was more coy. "They are all my children. You can’t pick favorites when it comes to children." But if you have any doubts about how closely Bradbury identifies with this work you need merely look at is protagonist Douglas Spaulding, whose very name makes clear that he is the author’s alter ego: Bradbury’s middle name is Douglas, and his great-grandmother’s maiden name was Spaulding. Here in Green Town, Illinois—the stand- in for Waukegan—we follow in this boy’s path during the summer of 1928.
Our novelist, at first glance, seems to be ignoring the science fiction and fantasy concepts that brought him to fame. But at closer examination, the familiar genre themes are employed repeatedly—albeit in altered or parodied form. In a chapter also published separately as a short story called "The Time Machine," Douglas’s friend Charlie Woodman promises to show his friends exactly that. "Travels in the past and the future?" inquires another youngster. "Only in the past, but you can’t have everything," Charlie responds. But the time machine here is nothing more than their neighbor Colonel Freeleigh, a Civil War veteran, whose stories of time past have such Proustian immediacy, that the children sit around him in rapt fascination as he recounts anecdote after anecdote.
No, this is not the same kind of time machine that H.G. Wells made famous, but Bradbury is willing to poke gentle fun at the very genre formulas that most readers would associate with his own work. And if he didn't make the point clearly enough in this interlude, he returns to it again in a separate chapter, one of the deepest stories Bradbury ever penned, about a 95-year- old woman in her final days and a young reporter for the local newspaper. This story, a delicate reworking of the timeless theme of the old trying to find something of value and remembrance to hand down to the young, seems almost too poised and mature, a vintage of something more substantial than dandelions, for an author in the full flush of youthful ambition to construct.
We see this same oblique reference to the fanciful and conceptual in other sections of Dandelion Wine . Two separate interludes in the book incorporate the subject of witchcraft, but in ways that parody the traditional MacBethian "fire burn and cauldron bubble" trappings of such accounts. Another chapter presents a Lovecraftian horror story about a killer known as the "Lonely One"; the account creates genuine suspense and is capped by an unsettling surprise ending—but then Bradbury undoes it all with an epilogue that turns the horror into comedy. In another chapter, Douglas’s neighbor Leo Auffmann decides to build a "happiness machine," and the contraption he constructs bears an uncanny resemblance to the modern day virtual reality generator known as the World Wide Web. Only in this instance, the residents of this small town reject the innovation, finding that it merely leaves them depressed and teary-eyed. The message here—the assertion that the modest reality of the here-and-now is superior to the grand promises of the future—is emblematic of Dandelion Wine as a whole. Who would have guessed, based on his earlier work, that Ray Bradbury would be the stick-in-the-mud to cop such a reactionary attitude?
Bradbury, by his nature, is a short story writer, and even when he tries his hand at longer forms, they still show their origins in more compact narrative forms. Fahrenheit 451 actually started life as a short story ("FireMan" published in 1947) then became a novella ("The Fireman" published in 1951) and only finally grew into a novel that barely stretches out to the 200 page mark. The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man try to create the impression of bulk via larger framing narratives, but without losing their identity as short story collections. Bradbury was more successful in stitching together his little stories into novelistic form in his accounts of small town life, notably here in Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes , but even in these instances the finished works come across as collections of vignettes that only gradually give way to a larger vision.
Even so, this book transcends the miniaturist sensibility of so much of Bradbury’s work. He has worked hard to draw together his diverse subplots through the use of unifying themes and characters, as well as various anticipations and flashbacks. As a result, Dandelion Wine has more coherence than, say, The Illustrated Man or The Martian Chronicles . Above all, a certain wistful nostalgia permeates the book, and gives it a unifying flavor from the opening page to the concluding sentence. But it is nostalgia mixed with an ineffable sense of immanence. That latter quality ultimately makes this book about the past—nowadays 1928 seems like the distant past—into an admonition for the reader to take watchful delight in the present.