If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
~ Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)
American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer Raymond Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois. During his career that spanned over seventy years, Bradbury wrote over 400 novelettes and short stories, twenty-one plays, at least twenty-six screenplays and teleplays, twelve stories for children, and numerous nonfiction essays. Bradbury was also the author of eleven novels, including The Martian Chronicles (1950); the dystopian Fahrenheit 451 (1953), for which he is perhaps best known; the semi-autobiographical Dandelion Wine (1957); Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962); Death is a Lonely Business (1985) and its two sequels, A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990) and Let’s All Kill Constance (2002); and Farewell Summer (2006), the acclaimed sequel to Dandelion Wine.
The continued story of a young boy and his friends trying to hold onto a waning summer and their youth, Farewell Summer represents the inevitable transition of life’s seasons and the process of letting go. Together with Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, Farewell Summer completes a trilogy based on Bradbury’s early life in Waukegan and is considered a poignant swan song of the National Medal of Arts recipient and one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
Photo of Bradbury in 1975 by Alan Light
