In the title story of The Day it Rained Forever, three dried-up old men in a dried-up old hotel in the desert are unexpectedly visited by a retired music teacher whose car has broken down outside. At one time I tried to write like he did, though now I see that would be quite impossible. My favourite of his novels is Dandelion Wine, which is actually more like a themed collection of short stories, on growing up in small-town America between the wars, a subject to which he often returned. Each story took one remarkable idea and executed it perfectly. I think of him as a short story writer rather than a novelist. But the first of his books I read was The Day it Rained Forever, one of his many books of short stories. As they said on the radio, he was probably best known for novels like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles.
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