The thirty-something journalist Bill Forrester strikes up a friendship with Helen Loomis, an elderly woman who never married but traveled to exotic and fascinating places.

After thinking about what her deceased husband would say, she decides to live in the present and embrace being old.

She meets a few of the children but does not like them when they sneer that she was never actually a young girl and that she has been old her whole life. Bentley is an elderly woman relatively new to the town. He ends up making the machine, but it only disseminates sorrow and makes him realize happiness is his home and his family. Leo then later works relentlessly to achieve his goal. Still obsessed with making the machine, he asks if his wife is happy and his wife responds sarcastically. Leo sits with his wife who tells him that they don’t need a Happiness Machine, but Leo is adamant. They suggest that Leo should make a “Happiness Machine.” Leo decides to do just that. Town jeweler Leo Auffmann insists that Grandfather and Douglas should not talk about dull and sad things. Both he and his mother are frightened for Douglas, but just as it seems like the ravine will triumph over them, Douglas returns without a care in the world. There Tom has an epiphany that a person is totally alone in their life and that life truly is loneliness and isolation. Spaulding worries that Douglas has not yet come back from playing so she takes Tom out into the dark night and the the edge of the ominous ravine. Tom has a few vignettes of his own as well. Jonas, who always has interesting things to give people, helps Douglas realize he wants to live. By the end of the novel, Douglas gets very sick and decides he is going to die, but a traveling man named Mr. His best friend moves away, he sees the tragedy in the death of Colonel Freeleigh and the impossible love of Bill and Helen and the demise of the Happiness Machine, he bemoans the loss of the trolley and other changes in the way things are done. These include his observations on the other characters in the tale and his delights and despair of death, time, and change. Douglas shows Tom a notebook in which he is recording events happening in his summer. Summer starts with new sneakers and Douglas is able to convince shopkeeper Mr. It is the first day of summer in 1928, and out in the forest with his father and brother Tom, he has a revelation and feels alive for the first time. Waking up early in the morning, Douglas Spaulding employs “magic” to awaken to townspeople. Since many chapters have isolated significance, some chapters have been summarized to give a broader idea of what the novel is about. Dandelion Wine is a nostalgic autobiographical fantasy in which the author forms a collage of isolated parts and melds them together.

Dandelion wine bradbury