A Study Guide for Ray Bradbury's "The Golden Kite, The Silver Wind"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Ray Bradbury's "The Golden Kite, The Silver Wind," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535836913

Book preview

10

The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind

Ray Bradbury

1953

Introduction

The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind is a short story by Ray Bradbury, first published in the magazine Epoch in 1953 and included in Bradbury's short-story collection The Golden Apples of the Sun in 1953. This volume is currently available in a Harper Perennial edition published in 1997. Bradbury included The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, his 1980 collection of one hundred of his favorite short stories, which remains in print. The story is also available in Bradbury's Classic Stories 1: From The Golden Apples of the Sun and R Is for Rocket, published by Spectra in 1990.

The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind is a fantasy set in ancient or medieval China. It describes the escalating confrontation between two rival cities and how their rivalry proves destructive to both. The mandarins who rule the cities must seek another, more productive way of conducting their affairs. But how are they going to do it? The story is a highly imaginative one, rich in the kind of poetic, metaphorical language that Bradbury typically uses. Entertaining in itself, the story also has a deeper level of meaning, serving as an allegory of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated world politics during the 1950s and for decades beyond.

Author Biography

Bradbury is one of America's best-known writers. A prolific author since the 1940s, Bradbury has written nearly six hundred science fiction and fantasy short stories, as well as several novels. He has also written realistic stories and novels, detective fiction, plays, screenplays, poetry, and essays.

Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to Leonard and Esther Bradbury. His father was a telephone lineman. The family moved around when Bradbury was a child, living in Arizona for several years and then moving to Los Angeles, California, in 1934. Bradbury was a voracious reader and discovered the pleasures of science fiction in the