Farewell Summer is a novel by Ray Bradbury, published on October 17, 2006. It was his last novel released in his lifetime. It is a sequel to his 1957 novel Dandelion Wine, and is set during an Indian summer in October 1929. The story concerns a mock war between the young and the old in Green Town, Illinois, and the sexual awakening of Doug Spaulding as he turns 14. With Something Wicked This Way Comes, they form a trilogy of novels inspired by Bradbury's childhood in Waukegan, Illinois.
The first chapter, also titled Farewell Summer, appeared in The Stories of Ray Bradbury in 1980. Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce discuss a draft of the unpublished novel in some detail in their book, Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (2004).
Publishers Weekly called the novel a "poignant, wise but slight 'extension' of the indefatigable Bradbury's semiautobiographical Dandelion Wine" and concluded, "Bradbury's mature but fresh return to his beloved early writing conveys a depth of feeling." Kirkus Reviews found it "a thin work, heavily reliant on dialogue, but one that serves as an intriguing coda to one of Bradbury's classics." Booklist said, "A touching meditation on memories, aging, and the endless cycle of birth and death, and a fitting capstone, perhaps, to a brilliant career."
Famous quotes containing the words farewell and/or summer:
“To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has wished, drawing the sum of one’s life—all in opposition to the wretched and revolting comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“They tell me, Lucy, thou art dead,
That all of thee we loved and cherished
Has with thy summer roses perished;
And left, as its young beauty fled,
An ashen memory in its stead.”
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)