[GrannyGrump]

SEVENTEEN
by Booth Tarkington (1869 – 1946)
First published 1916

From the author of The Magnificent Ambersons (winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize), Alice Adams (winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize), the Penrod books, and many others.

Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summer Time and the Baxter Family Especially William is a humorous novel that gently satirizes first love, in the person of a callow 17-year-old, William Sylvanus Baxter. The story takes place in a small city in the Midwestern United States shortly before World War I. Reading this, you are carried back to a gentler time, when adolescents were still innocent, and middle-class family life was simpler. On the other hand, in 1916, reviewer William Lyon Phelps wrote, “Every man and woman over fifty ought to read Seventeen. It is not only a skillful analysis of adolescent love, it is, with all its side-splitting mirth, a tragedy. No mature person who reads this novel will ever seriously regret his lost youth or wish he were young again....”

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Tinted illustrations by Arthur William Brown.
Many were double-page spread, wider than tall, so I placed them running vertically, please view them in landscape mode.

Any advice or suggestions?

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EDIT: Version 2, some text and format corrections, images redone, much smaller file-size. Cross-linked chapter titles to html Table of Contents. Added Large-cap version for readers with poor drop-cap support.
Previous downloads 130.