40 Fun Facts About All Summer in a Day

In 'All Summer in a Day', where do Margot's classmates shut her away just before the sun comes out?

A closet is where Margot spends the whole of the sunshine, forgotten by the class. She misses the one thing she had waited five years to see again.

How often does the sun come out on the rain-soaked Venus of Ray Bradbury's 'All Summer in a Day'?

Every seven years the rain stops over Bradbury's Venus, and then only briefly. The 1982 television version stretched the wait to nine.

NASA honored 'All Summer in a Day' author Ray Bradbury by naming a rover's landing site on which planet?

Mars is home to Bradbury Landing, the spot where Curiosity touched down in 2012. NASA announced the name on what would have been the writer's 92nd birthday.

Which novel, typed on a rented library typewriter, did Ray Bradbury publish the year before 'All Summer in a Day'?

Fahrenheit 451 cost Bradbury $9.80 to write, at ten cents per half-hour on a rented typewriter in UCLA's Powell Library. Its firemen burn books instead of saving them.

What kind of landscape does the sunlight reveal outside the school in Ray Bradbury's 'All Summer in a Day'?

A jungle smothers Bradbury's Venus, growing and collapsing again under the endless storms. Pulp writers of his day often pictured the cloud-wrapped planet as a steaming wilderness.

Which boy, one of only two pupils named in 'All Summer in a Day', leads the class in tormenting Margot?

William is the ringleader, shoving Margot and insisting she never wrote her own classwork. Every other child in the room goes unnamed.

What is the last thing the children do in Ray Bradbury's 'All Summer in a Day' as the storm returns?

They unlock the door and let Margot out, and there the story stops. Bradbury never shows how she reacts or what anyone says to her.

Which novel about schoolboys turning savage on an island came out in the same year as 'All Summer in a Day'?

Lord of the Flies was Golding's first novel, published in 1954. Like Bradbury's story, it shows ordinary children turning on one of their own once the adults look away.

Where do the colonists of Venus live to escape the endless rain in Ray Bradbury's 'All Summer in a Day'?

Underground is where the colony lives, in a network of tunnels beneath the storms. Even the children's school is down there.

Why can't Margot's classmates in 'All Summer in a Day' remember the last time the sun shone on Venus?

They were too young when it last appeared to keep any memory of it. Margot, who arrived later with clear memories of Earth's sky, is the exception.

How do Margot's classmates respond when she describes the sun in 'All Summer in a Day'?

They say she is lying and insist she cannot really remember. She came from Earth and remembers what they can only imagine.

Which feeling about Margot's memories of Earth drives her classmates' cruelty in 'All Summer in a Day'?

Jealousy is the engine of the bullying: Margot has seen and felt the sun, while the rest have only heard about it. The class punishes her for the difference.

What does Margot read aloud to the class that a boy insists she did not write in 'All Summer in a Day'?

A poem about the sun is Margot's contribution after the class spends a day reading about it. The teacher scolds the boy who shouts that she didn't write it.

Margot tells her classmates in 'All Summer in a Day' that the sun looks like which small coin?

A penny is Margot's picture of the sun, a small bright disc remembered from her early years on Earth. It is the kind of everyday detail only someone who had lived there would reach for.

What startles the children the moment the rain finally stops over Venus in 'All Summer in a Day'?

The silence stuns them after years of rain drumming without a break. Only then does the sun appear, flooding the sky with light.

What does the teacher warn the class as they burst outside in 'All Summer in a Day'?

Not to go too far is her only warning, because the sunshine will soon be gone. The children are already rushing to feel the sun on their skin.

Which American state did Margot leave at the age of four for Venus in 'All Summer in a Day'?

Ohio is the only other home Margot remembers, and its sunshine is what she cannot stop describing. She has now spent five of her nine years on Venus, longer than she ever lived on Earth.

Which American magazine first published Ray Bradbury's 'All Summer in a Day' in its March 1954 issue?

Fantasy & Science Fiction, launched in 1949, was already known for more literary stories than its rivals. Bradbury's tale of one cruel school day fitted it well.

Which Ray Bradbury story, filmed in The Illustrated Man, is set on Venus like 'All Summer in a Day'?

The Long Rain follows four crash survivors trudging through a Venusian downpour in search of a warm shelter. It appeared four years before 'All Summer in a Day'.

What might Margot's parents pay thousands of dollars to do in 'All Summer in a Day'?

They may take her back to Earth, because Margot is fading on Venus. She alone in the class has a way off the planet.

What do the children give Margot in the expanded ending of the 1982 TV film of 'All Summer in a Day'?

Flowers picked while the sun was out are handed to Margot as an apology. Bradbury's own ending is far colder and offers no such comfort.

What does the ringleader say the promised sunshine was just before Margot is grabbed in 'All Summer in a Day'?

Only a prank, he tells her: the sun is not coming after all. Margot cannot be sure he is wrong, and the rest of the class gleefully joins in.

Who has predicted the exact day of the sun's return to Venus in Ray Bradbury's 'All Summer in a Day'?

Scientists have named the day, though one child still asks whether they really know. The children spent the whole of the previous day reading and writing about what was coming.

What do the children peel off to feel the sun on their skin in Ray Bradbury's 'All Summer in a Day'?

Their jackets come off the moment they are outside, so the warmth can reach their arms. They agree it beats the sun lamps they grew up under.

What does Margot keep doing while a classmate shoves and taunts her in 'All Summer in a Day'?

Staring out the window at the rain is her only answer; she says nothing back. Her stillness seems to anger him more than any reply could.

Ray Bradbury's Venus in 'All Summer in a Day' echoed an old assumption that the planet's clouds were made of what?

Water was the natural guess, since Earth's clouds are made of it, so writers pictured swamps, oceans and endless storms below. Nobody could see through the cloud deck to check.

How did the first colonists reach Venus a generation before the events of 'All Summer in a Day'?

By rocket: the pupils are the children of the men and women who flew out from Earth to settle the planet. Margot is unusual in having made the crossing herself.

What do the children avoid doing when one of them suddenly remembers Margot in 'All Summer in a Day'?

Meeting each other's eyes is suddenly impossible, and they stand frozen in place. After a few moments they begin to walk slowly down the hall toward her.

What rare event involving Venus was under way on the June 2012 day that Ray Bradbury died?

A transit across the Sun shows Venus as a small dark spot, and after 2012 more than a century passes before the next. Bradbury, who twice set stories on a rainy Venus, died on the day it began.

Besides a coin, Margot says the sun is like a fire burning in which household object in 'All Summer in a Day'?

The stove is her second comparison, a homely picture of warmth from her old life on Earth. Her classmates, raised under sun lamps, have nothing of their own to set beside it.

Which unruly plants does Ray Bradbury compare the jostling schoolchildren to in 'All Summer in a Day'?

Weeds are his image for the crowd pressed together at the glass, and the same word returns when the sun exposes the tangled growth outside. Both have run wild without light.

Which 1959 Ray Bradbury collection includes 'All Summer in a Day' among its twenty-two stories?

A Medicine for Melancholy gathered the story five years after its magazine debut. British readers got a different selection that same year, and it left this one out.

Which Illinois hometown of 'All Summer in a Day' author Ray Bradbury became Green Town in his stories?

Waukegan is the small-town childhood Bradbury kept returning to, most famously in Dandelion Wine. He willed his personal library to its public library.

Which NASA probe showed in 1962 that the real Venus was nothing like the world of 'All Summer in a Day'?

Mariner 2 flew past in December 1962 and found a surface of roughly 400 to 500 degrees Celsius, far too hot for classrooms or children. Stories of a habitable Venus soon dried up.

Which children's television series aired the half-hour film of 'All Summer in a Day' on PBS?

WonderWorks also brought Anne of Green Gables and the BBC's Chronicles of Narnia to American children. Its version of Bradbury's story runs just 30 minutes.

The bully in the 1982 film of 'All Summer in a Day' is played by the grandson of which silent-era child star?

Jackie Coogan was the grandfather of Keith Coogan, who was still acting as Keith Mitchell when he made the film. He took the family's famous surname in 1986, after his grandfather died.

The 1982 film of 'All Summer in a Day' was shot by Robert Elswit, who later won an Oscar for which drama?

There Will Be Blood won Elswit the Academy Award for cinematography, a quarter-century after he photographed Bradbury's rainy classroom. He is best known for his work with director Paul Thomas Anderson.

Rain really does fall high above Venus, the setting of 'All Summer in a Day', but it consists of which acid?

Sulfuric acid rain falls from the clouds of Venus but evaporates in the heat before it can reach the ground. The humidity at the surface is less than 0.1 percent.

Where is the teacher when the children shut Margot away in Ray Bradbury's 'All Summer in a Day'?

Out of the room only briefly, she returns just as the class slips back to its place. Checking her watch, she leads everyone out without noticing that one child is missing.

Where did formal education end for 'All Summer in a Day' author Ray Bradbury, who said libraries raised him?

High school was as far as he went, because the Depression left his family no money for college. He went to the library three days a week for ten years instead.