Author Bradbury discovered early on that the best way for him to write was to get up, go to the typewriter, and crank out some words—any words—which would form the basis for a short story. His childhood fears and his memories of the summer lawns and friendships eventually coalesced into the tales that make up Dandelion Wine. Some parts of his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, were “industrial-ugly,” but he felt a childish love for all of it. As an adult visiting Waukegan, Bradbury found it no more or less pretty than any other Midwestern town, with its trees arcing over neighborhoods and red bricks still paving residential streets.

The book’s characters and places are real; Waukegan is Green Town—which, in its own way, is a sort of Byzantium, with its own gods and petty folk, wise and foolish people, life and death, joy and terror. Like Byzantium, Bradbury’s childhood is long gone, but its memory remains.

Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding wakes early in the third-story cupola of his grandparents’ boarding house next door, leans out the window, gazes over the tree-lined neighborhood, and feels the first stirrings of summer. Once a week, his parents let him sleep here.