Summer of '42 is a 1971 American coming of age romance film directed by Robert Mulligan, and starring Jennifer O'Neill, Gary Grimes, Jerry Houser, and Christopher Norris.

Based on the memoirs of screenwriter Herman "Hermie" Raucher, it follows a teenage boy who, during the summer of 1942 on Nantucket, embarks on a one-sided romance with a young woman, Dorothy, whose husband has gone off to fight in World War II.

The film was a commercial and critical success and was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning for Best Original Score for Michel Legrand.

Though a pop culture phenomenon in the first half of the 1970s, the novelization went out of print and slipped into obscurity throughout the next two decades until an off Broadway adaptation in 2001 brought it back into the public light and prompted Barnes & Noble to acquire the publishing rights to the book.

The film was followed by a sequel, Class of '44, also written by Raucher, with lead actors Grimes, Houser, and Conant reprising their roles.

All of them are virgins: Oscy is obsessed with the act of sex, while Hermie develops romantic interest in the bride, whose husband he spots leaving the island on a water taxi one morning.

Oscy stakes out Miriam, "giving" Hermie her less attractive friend, Aggie, and leaving Benjie with Gloria, a heavyset girl with dental braces.

Later, in preparation for a marshmallow roast on the beach with Aggie and Miriam, Hermie goes to the drugstore and hilariously builds up the nerve to ask the druggist for condoms (or "rubbers," as they were known in the '40s).

[4] Maureen Stapleton provided the voice for Sophie, Hermie's mother,[4] and film stuntman Walter Scott appears uncredited as Dorothy's husband.

The film (and subsequent novel) were memoirs written by Herman Raucher; they detailed the events in his life over the course of the summer he spent on Nantucket Island in 1942 when he was fourteen years old.

[5] Originally, the film was meant to be a tribute to his friend Oscar "Oscy" Seltzer, an Army medic killed in the Korean War.

While writing the screenplay, Raucher realized that despite growing up with Oscy and having bonded with him through their formative years, the two had never really had any meaningful conversations or known one another on a more personal level.

On the night memorialized in the film, Raucher randomly came to visit her, unaware his arrival was just minutes after she received notification of her husband's death.

He never saw her again; his last "encounter" with her, recounted on an episode of The Mike Douglas Show, came after the film's release in 1971, when she was one of over a dozen women who wrote letters to Raucher claiming to be "his" Dorothy.

[5] They had so little faith in the film becoming a box-office success, though, they shied from paying Raucher outright for the script, instead promising him ten percent of the gross.

[9] Though set on the east coast, Summer of '42 was filmed in Northern California, largely in Fort Bragg and Mendocino, as the real island of Nantucket was too developed to pass for the '40s.

[10] Shooting took place over eight weeks, during which O'Neill was sequestered from the three boys cast as "The Terrible Trio," in order to ensure that they did not become close and ruin the sense of awkwardness and distance that their characters felt towards Dorothy.

[13] In The Guardian, Derek Malcolm wrote Summer of '42 "is one of those rare films you can't help liking simply for its aspirations, which are so honest and open-minded.

"[14] Vincent Canby of The New York Times expressed that Hermie's encounter with Dorothy is "a good deal more common in novels and screenplays (and in the Hermie-like fantasies of middle-aged writers) than in real life", but praised the film's "reticent quality of its romanticism" and its actors.

[15] Canby concluded the "foreground is mostly accurate, in which sexual panic and fist fights and nose bleeds are treated with the great comic respect they deserve.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said the film is undercut by its rose-tinted nostalgic tone, writing, "Nostalgia is used as a distancing device -- to keep us safely insulated from the boy's immediate grief, love, and passion.

Robert Mulligan’s Summer of '42 has a large amount of charm and tenderness; it also has little dramatic economy and much eye-exhausting photography which translates to forced and artificial emphasis on a strungout story.

[28] Warner Bros. Publications released a sheet music folio, Summer of '42 & Other Hits of the Forties, which contains the movie theme and 34 other unrelated songs.

[29] Legrand's theme song for the film, "The Summer Knows", has since become a pop standard, being recorded by such artists as Peter Nero (who had a charting hit with his 1971 version), Biddu (1975 international chart hit), Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Andy Williams, Jonny Fair, Scott Walker, Elis Regina, Jackie Evancho, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Toots Thielemans, George Benson, Roger Williams, and Barbra Streisand.

[5] The 1988 film Stealing Home has numerous similarities to both Summer of '42 and Class of '44, with several incidents (most notably a subplot dealing with the premature death of the protagonist's father and the protagonist's response to it) appearing to have been directly lifted from Raucher's own life; Jennifer O'Neill stated in 2002 she believes Home was an attempted remake of Summer.

The only crew member from Summer of '42 to return to the project was Raucher himself, who wrote the script; a new director and composer were brought in to replace Mulligan and Legrand.

Of the four principal cast members of Summer of '42, only Jerry Houser and Gary Grimes returned for prominent roles, with Oliver Conant making two brief appearances totaling less than two minutes of screen time.

This story took place in an alternate reality where Herman Raucher had a son and divorced his wife, went back to Nantucket in 1962 with a still-living Oscar Seltzer, encountered Dorothy again and married her.