The Eternal Boy

Dodd, Mead brought out The Eternal Boy: Being the Story of the Prodigious Hickey in 1909, launching the Lawrenceville Stories of Owen Johnson (1878-1952), an American novelist who had attended Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and founded its literary magazine. The book follows Hickey, an inventive schoolboy prankster, through a string of schemes and small rebellions at the famous prep school, with characters drawn from Johnson’s own classmates. Reissued in 1910 under the better-known title The Prodigious Hickey, it opened a series that continued with The Varmint and The Tennessee Shad and drew comparisons to Kipling’s Stalky and Co. American school fiction owes much of its comic tradition to these books, and Hickey remains one of its most durable rogues. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.