Dink Stover, Doc MacNooder, The Tennessee Shad and their classmates have lived in the hearts of generations of American schoolboys and ex-schoolboys.
The three classic books that chronicle their prep school adventures, The Prodigious Hickey, The Varmint, and The Tennessee Shad have been incomprehensibly out of print for years. Now with their publication in one volume complete and unabridged, with the original illustrations, we will all once more be laughing—and shedding nostalgic tears—over the heroic exploits at Lawrenceville of...
Stover himself, who later went to Yale;
Hungry Smeed, who achieved apotheosis in setting the Great Pancake Record;
Hickey, that indomitable rebel against all authority;
Doc MacNooder and the Tennessee Shad, whose brilliantly imaginative schemes invariably worked out to the discomfiture—and finally to the education—of that pampered millionaire's son, the Uncooked Beefsteak;
and all the rest of their irrepressible friends including Dennis de Brian de Boru Finnegan, the Waladoo Bird, the Gutter Pup and Lovely Mead.
At the time of their original publication, George Ade called these books "the only real prep school stories ever written." And Booth Tarkington wrote: "The Varmint has given me more pleasure than anything I have ever read. It's a wonder...and the joyful pathos of the last part of it choked me all up—it was so true and so specifically bully. The Varmint, for all its fun, is what I call really serious writing and is worth thousands of the faddy pretentious things lately prevalent; it's infinitely rarer and harder to do."
It is a great joy to be able to make Owen Johnson's Lawrenceville Stories available again, both for those who have always loved them and for those who have never encountered them before.
—from the dust jacket
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