Why Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine Is a Great Book

     Following the same format as the other blogs striving to make the case to draw select works of Ray Bradbury into the Great Books canon, I remind the reader that on numerous occasions, Mortimer Adler wrote about the criteria that was used to determine which books of all the books written in the West would be placed within The Great Books of the Western World.  Contrary to confusion and many misstatements I've read over the years, Adler says it was essentially three criteria and they are as follows:
1) Contemporary significance - Even though historically valuable, these works address “issues, problems, or facets of human life that are of major concern to us today as well as at the time in which they were written.”
2) Rereadability - These are books “intended for the general reader that are worth reading carefully many times or studying over and over again...indefinitely rereadable for pleasure and profit.”
As I have confessed before in blogs and lectures, I re-read Dandelion Wine every year around the beginning of summer. This has become my habit for the past several years, and it is with ongoing pleasure and intellectual profit that I have done this. In truth, this work is rich in content and form and has enough meaningful ambiguity to sustain numerous readings and a enriching conversation. Additionally, among others that I have discussed this work with on a graduate level, they unanimously agree that it calls them to remember moments from their own childhood.
3) Extensive relevance and something of significance to say about a large number of the 102 great ideas of the thinking and writing done by the authors chosen.
Of the 102 Great Ideas Adler explored, Dandelion Wine touches upon or explores in a meaningful manner the following: Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Courage, Custom and Convention, Democracy, Desire, Duty, Education, Emotion, Eternity, Experience, Family, Fate, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Idea, Immortality, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Language, Life and Death, Love, Man, Mechanics, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Nature, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Pleasure and Pain, Progress, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Soul, Temperance, Time, Truth, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Will, Wisdom, and World.
Additionally, Adler said that the list of Great Books needed to be regularly reevaluated. With this in mind, I hope that I have made the case for including this novel by Ray Bradbury and including it in the open and extended list Adler proposed.
As with other Bradbury writings, there is often an earlier life or version before the published date. While Dandelion Wine was published in 19 (50 years ago and still in print), there were earlier kernel versions in short stories - "The Electrocution" 1946, "The Black Ferris" 1948, a screen play entitled "Dark Carnival" 1955, another screen play "The Marked Bullet" 1956, as well as an unpublished first-person novel Jamie and Me.
     Dandelion Wine should be read as a companion story to Something Wicked This Way Comes .  Even Bradbury clustered these two stories with Farewell Summer and called these the Illinois trilogy.  
     Whether read as a nostalgic tale of days lost, or a reflection on the wonder of being human and living fully, this is a novel that should be rescued from the middle school reading list and the bin of literary obscurity and given due attention.  Beyond being a masterfully crafted exploration of numerous humane themes, it is a delightful, at times, but ultimately a profound affirmation of being alive.