From the dust jacket:
This is the year's gayest and most ingratiating book.
It is the story of the Little family: of Filmer, age fifteen, and Goody, age eighteen, of Goody's heterogeneous collection of suitors, and Filmer's frequently peculiar friends.
It is also the story of Ripley Little, who is a doting father, if upset at times by the family life surging around him. And though he is kind, generous, indulgent and in every way a sterling American, even his best friend would never deny that he was occasionally irascible. Whenever his irascibility became vocal (as it frequently did) it worried Mrs. Little. Strange sounds escaped him – sounds like jobjam the bastinadoed Hellespont helm! For Mr. Little had developed his own method of self-expression, and while in practise it might have made even Ernest Hemingway blush, closely analyzed it was above criticism.
It is hard to say which Mr. Little found most trying: Filmer's magnificent and wistful adolescence, or the school of immature young men who swarmed about Goody. It is useless to deny that Filmer's struggles with the pangs of first love and his spectacular adventure with the Eucalina tablets at times ranked first, but Goody's early essays into adult life ran a close second. Goody's suitors wreck Mr. Little's cars more frequently, but on the other hand Filmer's escapades seem to have a higher visibility in the town.
The climax belongs to Goody. First because of Henrietta Pellar, her little school friend from the deep South, who, in spite of manifold charms for her own set, is one of the most poisonous young women in recent literature, and second because of the great adventure of the trip to Maine, an epic which involves a narrow country road, a team of hay, and, among sulphurous clouds, the local jail.
No parent will read this rambunctious novel unmoved, but to enjoy the wisdom, the humor, and the sheer entertainment with which Booth Tarkington, the first name in American letters, has filled these pages, one need hardly be a parent. Like Penrod and Seventeen, THE FIGHTING LITTLES has a universal appeal.
Dust jacket art by Laune.
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