By Ray Bradbury
William Morrow
Copyright: © 2006
Original Copyright: © 1957
Oh, when I look back now That summer seemed to last forever And if I had the choice Yeah, I'd always wanna be there Those were the best days of my life Song written by Bryan Adams/Jim Vallance - Summer of 69 - Reckless album - Released 1985
Bradbury Biography:
“All education is self-discovery.” Bradbury
Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012, was an American treasure, an exceptionally talented and prolific writer in multiple genres that included science fiction, horror, and mystery but his passion lay in the field of fantasy. He felt that fantasy, by his definition, was “a depiction of the unreal“. He took inspiration and pleasure from the fantastical works of Poe, Wells, and Verne and spent a lifetime mining his imagination for the unreal. Fantasy was where he could not only “create myths for the future” but warn society of the dangers of technology and conformity. In his words: “to prevent the future.”
Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, a small town of 20-30 thousand people, at the time, north of Chicago, and came of age there during the Great Depression. It was a time when the future was murky, and he said he needed his imagination to see through the gloom. That imagination was fruitful and varied.
His writing was packed full of social commentary, especially Fahrenheit 451, but more on that in a bit. He wrote about the unreal side of the present but with an eye to the future. His prescient vision alerted us 75 years ago about the evils that will come from a monoculture dispensed from the organs of mass media and technology. He was afraid that it would keep society passive and ignorant. And ignorance has come to pass.
Bradbury never drove a car, but he did ride in them, he did not board a plane, heights bothered him, until he was in his sixties, and he never used a computer. He thought the internet was useless, perfectly encapsulating a flaw, maybe the major flaw in science fiction: predicting the future is hard and mostly wrong. Machines didn’t interest him but when he wrote about them, he just made it up as he went.
He initially corrected people when questioned about his “science fiction” writing, “I don’t write science fiction” he insisted. “I write fantasy. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.” In later interviews when referred to as a science fiction writer he just graciously accepted it and moved on. Science fiction he also said was “a depiction of the unreal but with an attempt to be faithful to reality.” He didn’t want to be faithful to reality. He stated that of all the stories he wrote, and it’s believed that there were more than a thousand of them, no one seems to be able to add them all up, Fahrenheit 451 is the only true science fiction he ever wrote. It not only has withstood the test of time as a classic piece of sci-fi literature, but it also was rendered into two motion pictures in 1966 and 2018. The former was only marginally bad with the latter being just flat out bad, proving the point that low budget sci-fi does not win any awards in Hollywood or with audiences.
Bradbury made his mark in the literary world with The Martian Chronicles, a collection of loosely connected short stories released in 1950. The book chronicles the settlement of Mars, the home of Martians by Americans fleeing an Earth falling into a hellish abyss.
During the height of the second Red Scare beginning in 1947, Bradbury warned of government censorship with his fourth and possibly his greatest novel, Fahrenheit 451. The story initially appeared in book format in 1953 and was reprinted in the nascent publication Playboy in 1954. Fahrenheit 451 is the story of firemen not putting out fires but starting them. They burn books, and buildings with books to keep people ignorant and thus obedient. An obedient population was not a threat to the government.
Dandelion Wine:
Dandelion Wine is Bradbury’s fifth novel and his most intimate creation. It is a loose collection of forty-nine semi-autobiographical short stories detailing a 12-year-old boy, Douglas Spaulding and his 10-year-old brother Tom, trying to stretch out the summer of 1928 into a never-ending triumph of pubescence experience in small town America.
In a 1974 introduction to Dandelion Wine, titled Just This Side of Byzantium…, Bradbury writes: “…Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply. The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home…Here is my (Bradbury’s) celebration, then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well complete terror written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, dressed in his bat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first ‘novel’.”
About half of the chapters in the book were initially published, starting in 1946, as short stories in magazines such as Weird Tales (The Night), Charm (The Green Machine), and The Saturday Evening Post (The Happiness Machine). In 1957 all the stories were brought together into the book, Dandelion Wine. The title refers to Douglas’s grandfather making wine every summer from the petals of dandelions. Bradbury used the title as a metaphor for cramming all the joys and happenings of summer into one bottle. Or one book.
As a testament to the lasting appeal of the book, the 1971 crew of Apollo 15 named a lunar crater Dandelion. In 1986, as a testament to Bradbury’s lasting appeal as a writer, an asteroid was named after him called 9766 Bradbury.
And finally, in a 2010 interview with Universe Today a few years before his death, in reference to being buried on Mars, he said: “I don’t want to be the first live person to arrive there,” he said. “It’ll be too late. But I want to be the first dead person that gets there. I want to arrive in a Campbell’s soup can. Bury me on Mars in (a) thing called the Bradbury Abyss. They gotta name a place on Mars for me, and I will welcome that.” Maybe Elon Musk can help with this.
Literary Criticism:
Ray Bradbury writes poetry as prose. Natural and chatty prose. Prose rich in explanation, metaphor, and image. Prose that is a joy to read, planting scenes in your mind that grow into a picture worthy of Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea.
Dandelion Wine is the extraordinary time in a boy’s life where innocence, friendship, and happiness occur without the weight of the substantial and ponderous adult years.
Read the snippet below from chapter 29 of Dandelion Wine, Summer’s Ice House and tell me you do not feel the chill.
Deep in winter they had looked for bits and pieces of summer and found it in furnace cellars or in bonfires on the edge of frozen skating ponds at night. Now, in summer, they went searching for some little bit, some piece of the forgotten winter...Summer’s Icehouse on a summer day! They said the words, laughing, and moved to peer into that tremendous cavern where in fifty, one-hundred, and two-hundred-pound chunks, the glaciers, the icebergs, the fallen but not forgotten snows of January…
Dandelion Wine is a masterpiece of prose, of imagination, and fantasy.
Bradbury Literary Awards:
- World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement 1977
- Prometheus Award for Fahrenheit 451 1984
- Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement 1989
- P.V. Helmerich Distinguished author Award 1994
- Emmy Award for The Halloween Tree 1994
- First Fandom Hall of Fame Award 1996
- Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame Inductee 1999
- Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters 2000
- Hollywood Walk of Fame Star 2002
- National Medal of Arts 2004
- Sir Arthur Clarke Award 2007
- Specila Citation Pulitzer. 2007
- Ordre des Arts et des Lettres 2007
- J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award 2008
- Spike TV Scream Award 2010
Bradbury Bibliography (‘Novels’ Only):
- Dark Carnival 1947
- The Martian Chronicles 1950
- The Illustrated Man 1951
- Fahrenheit 451 1953
- Dandelion Wine 1957
- Something Wicked This Way Comes 1962
- The Halloween Tree 1972
- Death Is a Lonely Business 1985
- A Graveyard for Lunatics 1990
- Green Shadows, White Whale 1992
- From the Dust Returned 2001
- Let’s All Kill Constance 2002
- Farewell Summer 2006
References and Readings:
- Ray Bradbury. (Interview). By James Day. Day at Night CUNY TV 75. 1972.
- Ray Bradbury. (Interview). By Lisa Potts and Chad Coates Blank on Blank PBS. 1972
- Classic Ray Bradbury Interview. By R. Jacobs, D. Truesdale, and B. Wayne. Tangent Online. 1975
- Interview with Ray Bradbury. (Interview). By Stephen Banker. Washington Post. 1979
- Ray Bradbury: ‘It’s Lack That Gives Us Inspiration’. By Fresh Air. 1988.
- An Interview With Sci-Fi Legend Ray Bradbury. By Catherine Donaldson-Evans. Fox News. 2004
- Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews. By Sam Weller. Stop Smiling Books. 2010
- Dandelion Wine. Uncredited. Kirkus Reviews. 2012
- ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Author Ray Bradbury Dies At 91. By Arnie Seipel. NPR. 2012. Copyright 2021
- Ray Bradbury. Uncredited. Wikipedia. 2001 (Latest Update 2023)
- Dandelion Wine. By IP Address Only. Wikipedia. 2004 (Latest Update 2023)
- Summer of ’69. By RedWolf 24. Wikipedia 2005 (Latest Update 2023)
- Summer of ’69 Lyrics. Uncredited. Genius. No date.
- Summer 1928. By D. Driftless. Readers Lane. No date
- Dandelion Wine. Uncredited. Spark Notes. No date
FootnoteA: Photo of Ray Bradbury. Lennox McLendon / AP. Date Unknown
FootnoteB: The Martian Chronicles. NBC TV Poster. circa 1980.
FootnoteC: Fahrenheit 451. HBO Movie Poster. 2018
FootnoteD: Douglas Spaulding in a Field of Dandelions with Bradbury in the Background. GPT-4 Generated. 2023
FootnoteE: The Triumph of Galatea. Fresco by Rapheal. circa 1512.
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