Breaking Away

Breaking Away is one of Oliver Optic’s many novels for boys, with the title pointing to the kind of departure from established circumstances that the protagonist undertakes across the novel. The breaking away framework gives Optic room to develop the kind of independence and self determination plot that the wider rags to respectability tradition required.

Oliver Optic was the pen name of William Taylor Adams, a Massachusetts writer who became one of the most prolific producers of boys’ fiction in mid to late nineteenth century America with more than a hundred novels.

For scholars of nineteenth century American children’s literature or of the wider career of Oliver Optic, the various novels in his catalogue are essential. Many are now in the public domain.