St. Charles Reads
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

St. Charles Reads

Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine has been chosen for the second St. Charles Reads. The Library and Community Unit School District 303 are cosponsors of the program. “We are pleased to partner with the school district in sponsoring this important community event,” said Library Director Diana Brown. “We look forward to sharing ideas about the book, the period in our country’s history that it celebrates, and the life and work of its author, a son of the Midwest.”

“When we talked about possible books to read, we decided to look for a book that would rebuild our sense of community,” said Dr. Sandra Wright, District 303 Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction. Wright and District Director of Media and Technology Anne Fleming are on the St. Charles Reads planning committee. Using input from students, Library staff, and teachers, the committee favored a book that celebrates family life and homecomings, and the influence of the past in shaping the present; one that would be meaningful today for the St. Charles community, and offer its readers a challenge or issue. Bradbury’s book hit all of those targets.

Synopsis

Ray Bradbury’s moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out as the author’s most deeply personal work, a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small town summer in 1928.

Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather’s renowned intoxicant, and the distant clang of the trolley’s bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine that can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.

Parts of Dandelion Wine appeared as short stories in magazines from 1946 to 1957. In 1975 Bradbury added an introduction and the novel was published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Points to Ponder

• Dandelion Wine presents a picture of a tranquil, old style, semi-rural life in Green Town and the effects of the new encroaching technology. Consider these contrasting portraits.
• Find examples of the unreliability of modern technology and its dehumanizing effects. Do you think the author had television in mind with his creation of the Happiness Machine?
• How is Dandelion Wine a story of community?
• Is Bradbury drawn to the security of an idealized, unchanging past as well as the excitement of the unknown world of technology?
• Unlike many science fiction and or fantasy writers, Bradbury does not write of gadgets but rather about the soul and moral imagination of the individual. Do you agree? Explain your answer.
• It is said that Bradbury’s prose is always poetic and alive with color and rhyme. Can you find examples to support this statement?
• Dandelion Wine has been called a fantasy, yet the story is rooted in elements of the real world. How does fantasy help the characters deal with and explain the wonders and sorrows of this life? Is the book a tribute to Bradbury’s faith in the ability of human beings to overcome life’s obstacles?

Recommended Resources

About the Author

The Bradbury Chronicles: Stories in Honor of Ray Bradbury
William F. Nolan and Martin H. Greenberg (Eds.)
FIC BRA

Ray Bradbury
David Mogen 813.54 BRA

Ray Bradbury: An American Icon
813.54 BRA (Nonfiction video)

Bradbury: An Illustrated Life: A Journey of Far Metaphor
Jerry Weist B Bradbury (on order)

Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day
Richard Bleiler REF 809.38762 SCI

The St. Charles Public Library has critical studies on the works of Ray Bradbury. For further assistance, please visit the Information Services Desk.

Works of Ray Bradbury at the St. Charles Public Library - All are works of fiction unless otherwise noted.

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

A Chrestomathy of Ray Bradbury: A Dramatic Selection 812.54 BRA

Dandelion Wine: A Novel

Fahrenheit 451 (Also available in Large Print, Audio Book and Video FAH)

From the Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance (Also available in Large Print and Audio Book.)

Golden Apples of the Sun (Audio Book available)

A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities

Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel

The Halloween Tree
JH BRA in Youth Services

The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope: Poems
811.54 BRA

I Live by the Invisible: New and Selected Poems
811.6 BRA

I Sing the Body Electric: Stories (Audio Book available)

The Illustrated Man (Audio Book available)

Let’s All Kill Constance: A Novel (Available in Large Print)

Long After Midnight and the Halloween Tree
(Audio Book available)

The Machineries of Joy: Short Stories

The Martian Chronicles (Available in Large Print and Audio Book)

The October Country (Audio Book available)

One More for the Road: A New Story Collection

Quicker Than the Eye: Short Stories

Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes
VIDEO SOM

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Audio Book available)

Tales of Fantasy (Audio Book available)

The Toynbee Convector: Stories

Twice Twenty-Two 814.54 BRA

Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures
814.54 BRA

Zen in the Art of Writing
808.02 BRA

Bradbury Sites on the Web

RayBradbury.com

Wired for Books - Audio Interviews with Ray Bradbury

St. Charles Public Library Online Premium Databases

Online Premium Databases are available for public use within the Library and accessible from home with a St. Charles Public Library Card.

Biography Resource Center
General Reference Center Gold
Literary Resource Center – LRC
Novelist
Student Resource Center including American Decades

Ray Bradbury - August 22, 1920
A Brief Biography

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22, 1920, the third son of Leonard and Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury. The author’s childhood was part of a loving extended family that supplied a backdrop for his stories. Frank Baum’s Oz, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan tales, the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the great Blackstone the Magician enchanted the young man. Green Town of Dandelion Wine is Waukegan of the 1920s. Bradbury’s works are firmly rooted in the past, both America’s and the author’s own, and his works honor the commonplace.

Between 1926 and 1933, the Bradbury family moved back and forth between Arizona and Los Angeles, finally settling in California where he still resides today. While a student at Los Angeles High School, Bradbury participated in the drama club and planned on an acting career until two of his teachers recognized and encouraged his extraordinary writing talent. Serious about his writing, Bradbury began contributing to fan magazines and even joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction League. His formal education ended with his graduation from high school in 1938, but Bradbury continued to educate himself selling newspapers by day and writing stories in the evening.

“Hollerbochen’s Dilemma,” Bradbury’s first published short story, appeared in 1938, in Imagination! and his first paid story “Pendulum” was printed in Super Science Stories in 1941. His mentors during these early years were Robert Heinlein, Henry Hasse, and Leigh Brackett. By 1944, the author began to appreciate his own distinctive talents and began devoting himself entirely to his writing career. Although enthralled by the works of Thomas Wolfe during high school, Bradbury later immersed himself in the works of Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Sherwood Anderson, and Jessamyn West.

In 1946, Ray Bradbury met his wife Maguerite McClure, a graduate of George Washington University, while she was working in a local bookstore. The couple was married in 1947 in the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd of Los Angeles. They have four daughters; Susan, Ramona, Alexandra, and Tina.

With the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, Bradbury’s reputation as an important science fiction author was established. This book is the story of an attempt to colonize the planet Mars. It is as much a work of social criticism as it is science fiction and depicts America of the fifties as its population faces the threat of nuclear war, censorship, racism and the dehumanizing effects of the new technology.

Fahrenheit 451 was released in 1953, and is another of Bradbury’s important works. It is a futuristic novel in which the government has banned the written word. The protagonist is a book burner who enjoys his job until he learns of a time when reading was legal and people did not live in fear for their lives.

Through the years, Ray Bradbury has won many awards including the O’Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the Aviation-Space Writer’s Association Award, the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Gandalf Award. Several of his books and short stories have been adapted for the screen and television. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Icarus Montgolfier Wright are among his film productions. Several of his short stories were presented on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone.

Aside from Bradbury’s novels, short stories and screenplays, he also has published poems, plays and essays, and through the years he has been a consultant for various civic and educational projects.

In 2000, he was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and last year Fahrenheit 451 was selected for the 2002 “One City, One Book: LA.” He and his wife still live in Los Angeles where he continues to write and lecture.

The Quotable Ray Bradbury

Censorship:

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Head vs. Heart:

“If we listened to our intellect we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go in business because we’d be cynical: ‘It’s gonna go wrong.’ Or ‘She’s going to hurt me.’ ‘Or, ‘I’ve had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore…’ Well, that’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

Philosophy:

“From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in the future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

Politics:

“I think we have a chance to do something about education… It doesn’t matter who does it—Democrats or Republicans—but it’s long overdue.”

Problem Solving:

“You feed yourself. Make sure you have all the information, whether it’s aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, I don’t care what it is. Then you walk away from it and let it ferment. You ignore it and pretend you don’t care. Next thing you know, the answer comes.”

Science Fiction:

“Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.”

“Science fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.”

Writing:

“All that stuff that’s collected up in my head—poetry and mythology and comic strips and science fiction magazines—comes out in my stories. So you get to a certain age and you’re like a pomegranate, you just burst. And the ideas spill out.”

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.”

“So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”

Ray Bradbury’s National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Acceptance Speech

As a boy of ten years I could imagine nothing finer than running to the library on a windy October night, pushed by the cold wind and traveling with autumn leaves to arrive at the wonderful place, the library, where I would stand for a moment in the wide open door and call into the deeps: “Are you there?”

And all the silent voices of the ghosts of my most loved authors would answer from buried years, naming themselves Poe and Hawthorne and Dickens and Verne and Burroughs and Wells, and their whispering, promising answer was: “Yes.”

And I would step in to join the shadows.

In my stage version of Fahrenheit 451, my Fire Chief comes home to a forbidden digitalized library and calls the same question to the untouched books. And their electric voices respond: “Yes.”

I wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the basement typing room of the UCLA library in nine days of white-hot inspiration, dashing up and down stairs to prowl the stacks, to touch familiar and unfamiliar books, to hold them, to smell them, before plunging back down to finish the book with that same affirmative answer sounding in my ears.

Now The National Book Foundation that believes that reading is the most important part of our future has come to me out of the depths of all those libraries and all those loving times with all those voices combined as one and given me this affirmation.

To which, standing in the library door on those windy October nights when I was a child, listening to all my friends waiting on the twilight shelves, my answer is: Yes!

Dandelion Wine Companion Booklist

Celebrate family life and homecomings and enjoy stories that relate how the past shapes the future. Adults are invited to read Dandelion Wine. Students may join in the celebration by reading these books. Browse the display in Youth Services.

Fiction for ages 5-8

May’naise Sandwiches & Sunshine Tea by Sandra Belton. JE Belton
A grandmother and her granddaughter flip through a scrapbook full of memories to a favorite page that tells the story of may’naise sandwiches and sunshine tea.

Dandelions by Eve Bunting. J Bunting
Zoe and her family move from Illinois to the endless plains of Nebraska where they must create a sod house, a well, and a new life under difficult circumstances.

The Patchwork Quilt by Valerie Flournoy. JE Flournoy
Using scraps cut from the family’s old clothing, Tanya helps her grandmother make a beautiful quilt that tells the story of her family’s life.

Prairie Town by Bonnie Geisert. J 307.72 GEI
Follow the seasons and the activities of the townsfolk and farm folk in a small Midwestern town.

The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant. JE Rylant. J KIT Ryl
The story about a family whose relatives from Virginia spent the summer with them and everyone had a wonderful time.

Oh, Brother! by Ken Stark. J Stark
In 1952, two brothers aged nine and ten, enjoy a year filled with fun and adventure in the farmlands of northeastern Illinois.

Fiction for ages 9 and up

The Summer of the Dancing Horse by Eth Clifford. J Clifford
Bessie recounts her eighth summer, in 1923, which is filled with special times and people, hard work, and small treasures.

Someday by Jackie French Koller. JH Koller. (Audio Book available in Young Adult)
In 1938, fourteen-year-old Celie must cope with change. As the day approaches when the Swift River Valley will be flooded to create a reservoir for Boston, she has to leave her Enfield, Massachusetts home and her life-long friend, Chubby.

One Lucky Summer by Laura McGee Kvasnosky. J Kvasnosky
Steven’s adjustment to moving to a new town is a difficult one, especially because his mother pushes him to become friends with Lucinda, the girl next door. All they manage to do is annoy one another until they find an orphaned baby squirrel that needs their help. By working together, they find out that they have a lot in common.

Fair Weather by Richard Peck. JH Peck. (Audio Book available)
In 1893, thirteen-year-old Rosie and members of her family travel from their Illinois farm to Chicago to visit Aunt Euterpe and attend the World’s Columbian Exposition. This adventure, along with an encounter with Buffalo Bill and Lillian Russell, turns out to be a life-changing experience for everyone.

A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck. JH Peck. (Audio Book available)
Joey recounts his annual summer trips during the Great Depression to rural Illinois with his sister Mary Alice to visit their larger-than-life grandmother.
Sequel: A Year Down Yonder.

Come Next Spring by Alana White. J White
In 1949, in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, Salina struggles to accept the inevitability of change—a highway cutting through farmland, a brother and sister starting their own lives, and nothing left in common with her best friend.

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. J Wilder
This is the first in the series of the classic “Little House” series that explores the life and times of the Ingalls family as they make their living on the prairie.

Prepared by SCPL 9/03