Dandelion Wine Analysis

Green Town, Illinois, Summer, 1928 Green Town represents every small town everywhere: There's basically one of everything, and everybody knows each other. If you say you're going to the shoe store...

Although our narrator spends most of his (or her—we really don't know) time occupying Doug's skull, he has a lot of ground to cover in Green Town. Because almost each chapter focuses on a dif...

It's pretty easy to see why Dandelion Wine should be classified as a family drama—you'd have drama, too, if your parents lived next door to your grandparents and they all ran a boarding house t...

Bradbury is famously cynical about both man and machine (just read Fahrenheit 451 for proof), but Dandelion Wine is a sort of literary Norman Rockwell painting. While we have touches of Bradbury's...

In the introduction to Dandelion Wine, Bradbury said, "in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put...

For twelve-year-old Douglas Spalding in Dandelion Wine, dandelion wine represents summer. Three times a year, he and his little brother, Tom, pick all the dandelions in their grandfather's yard for...

Given that one of the major themes in Dandelion Wine is happiness, and that almost every chapter is a short story with its own happy ending, it would be a real rip-off if the book didn't end happil...

Dandelion Wine is a quick read, with straightforward and understandable language. Plus, some of the super-short stories that make up this book are only half a page long. You can tell non-reader...

Oh, Those Summer Nights  Finally—after a school year in which his feet were encased in blocks of ice and he had to walk uphill both ways, Douglas Spaulding is on summer vacation. Summer...

Anticipation Stage (The Call) The advent of summer is Doug's call to adventure and discovery. He even goes out and gets a new pair of sneakers to speed him on his travels. After all, there are r...

Act I encompasses Doug's awareness that he's alive, beginning of the notebook, and the construction and (self-)destruction of the Happiness Machine. It concludes at the end of Chapter 16, with Do...

Bradbury's motto in life was: "Jump off the cliff, and build your wings on the way down." (Source)The Lonely One was a real dude from Bradbury's childhood, though luckily for Bradbury and the folks...

There's no sex at all in Dandelion Wine. No nudity, nada. The only curse words are one use of "damn" and one of "hell," and as Tom says, "hell doesn't count because it's a place." With the exce...

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