Before moving ahead, readers might like to see my thoughts on Dandelion Wine and its sequel, Farewell Summer, located here, just to get up to speed on this classic sequence of tales.

There are three kinds of stories in this collection of more than two dozen, as outlined in a knowledgeable and informative introduction by Professor Jon Eller (more on this introduction later): those that have seen print already, complete stories only heretofore found in manuscript and vignettes in manuscript. The latter two categories comprise the majority, so there are plenty of surprises all around. Here are a few standouts.

"End of Summer" finds a prim young woman named Hattie bursting out of her shell—but only at night, in an odd, slightly mad way. Another, even younger, woman named Marianne seems besotted with a new suitor in "The Great Fire." But all is not as it seems. Doug Spaulding, hero of the older books, manages to fall in love with a boarder, Leonora Welkes, in "All on a Summer's Night." Will she reciprocate?

Can love return after decades to a female hermit? "Miss Bidwell" holds the answer. "The Screaming Woman" finds a young girl named Margaret Leary in a tense race to save the life of a potential murder victim. But adults offer her no help. Another tale of a young boy's love for an older woman crops up in "These Things Happen," where student Bob Markham becomes infatuated with teacher Ann Taylor.

In Dandelion Wine, Lavina Nebbs escaped her demise at the hands of the serial killer known as the Lonely One. Alas, the alternate version of events in "At Midnight, in the Month of June" finds her not so lucky. "The Death of So-and-so" anatomizes the habit the elderly have for peddling mortality. Finally, among the vignettes, we find several stirring speeches by Doug's grandfather, and my single favorite item, a piece probably no longer than 500 words that evokes—"The Dog."

The fragments of a book that never was

Jon Eller discusses with meticulous and hard-won detail the origin of all these pieces, how a young writer seeking to come up with his first novel—to be called Summer Morning, Summer Night—threw off a thousand inspired passages (in the midst of a dozen other pressing assignments) that ultimately failed to cohere into the desired scheme. Then, under editorial pressure, came a frenzy of snipping and selecting and discarding, resulting in the Dandelion Wine we all know. Bradbury's emulation of one of his idols, Thomas Wolfe, was never greater than at this moment!

The revelation at last of these discarded and reworked bits allows us finally to see the original outlines of Bradbury's paean to his youth. And it shows us that he would have had a much wider focus than youthful Doug and Tom Spaulding and the other folks in their immediate sphere. Bradbury's desire to show teenage and adult lives surfaces in such pieces as "A Walk in Summer," with its absolutely brilliant imagery of an adolescent boy and girl caught in a storm and seeking shelter in a hollow tree.

The prose in this particular tale—and, generally speaking, in all the others—is primo Bradbury, emanating from the part of the career curve that marks the upward ascension of his powers. His imagination is likewise humming on all cylinders. He can insert himself nimbly into the mind of Margaret Leary or the mind of the Lonely One, and vary his language accordingly. His imagery is rich and not overdone (although I did note the same metaphor of automaton figures exiting a Swiss clock at least three times). And he can pull O. Henry-style twists with the best of them, such as in "Love Potion," where two old biddies craft an unlikely drink.

Having these stories as supplement to the two Green Town novels does not radically alter our sense of what they were about—love, death, the passage of time, human joys and sorrows—nor diminish their pleasures, but they do make us wish that we could go back in time and pull the original conception completely realized from Bradbury's brain.