A Study Guide for Ray Bradbur's "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Ray Bradbur's "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh," 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 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535836296

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The Drummer Boy of Shiloh

Ray Bradbury

1960

Introduction

The Drummer Boy of Shiloh is a short story by Ray Bradbury first published on April 30, 1960, in the Saturday Evening Post, where it was illustrated by Ken Davies, a prominent realist painter. It first appeared in a book collection in Bradbury's The Machineries of Joy, published in 1964 and reissued in numerous editions since then. Bradbury is best known today for his future-set dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. For The Drummer Boy of Shiloh, however, the author turned to American history, specifically the Civil War's Battle of Shiloh (also called the Battle of Pittsburg Landing), which took place in Hardin County in southwestern Tennessee on April 6–7, 1862. The story reveals the thoughts and emotions of a young drummer boy on the eve of the battle, considered one of the major engagements of the Civil War. Interestingly, the story never specifies whether the boy is attached to the Union (Northern) or Confederate (Southern) army. The Drummer Boy of Shiloh is included in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales, published in 2003.

Author Biography

Raymond Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, the third son of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Moberg Bradbury. Waukegan, an idyllic small town north of Chicago where Bradbury spent much of his youth, is essentially the setting of many of his stories under the name Green Town. In his youth, a much-beloved aunt gave him books of fairy tales and took him to see such movies as The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and these, along with the Buck Rogers movies and such tales as Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, stimulated his imaginative life.

In search of work, Bradbury's father twice moved the family between Illinois and Arizona from 1926 to 1933. Bradbury began writing fiction in about 1931, recording his first stories on butcher's paper. In 1934, his family moved permanently to Los Angeles, where Bradbury graduated from high school in 1938 and lived the remainder of his life. He joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction League in 1937 and, in 1938, published his first short story, Hollerbochen's Dilemma, in the magazine Imagination! During World War II, he was exempted from service because of poor eyesight. Through