Penrod

Booth Tarkington

Feb 2015 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

Booth Tarkington’s humorous take on youth, imagination, and the seemingly endless font of adult foolishness

Penrod Schofield is the epitome of a precocious twelve-year-old: crafty in his dealings developing a business and mischievous in his interactions at the local grammar school. He is neither a rascal nor a paragon of virtue, but rather an ordinary boy growing up in a rural early-nineteenth-century Indiana town. In these comic sketches by Booth Tarkington, it is up to Penrod, along with his dog, Duke, and friends Sam, Herman, and Verman, to rescue themselves from countless scrapes and humiliations—usually of the adults’ making.  
 
Penrod is deliriously effective in its evocation both of an earlier era and of the unfettered joy of being a young man in a world of bikes, cap guns, and cranky authority figures. Tarkington’s heartwarming story highlights the naiveté of youth—and the hypocrisy of adulthood.
 
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Ratings and reviews

There's some politically incorrect handling of race relations that is rather jarring to encounter, but the 11-year-old title character, "the worst boy in town," is delightful, and the narrator's explanations of what children think are sublime.

I loved this book. It took me back to a more innocent, interesting time when children played, rather than having play dates. Penrod is a treasure. I'll miss him.

Too much violence.

About the author

Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) was an American novelist and playwright. Tarkington won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919 for the novel The Magnificent Ambersons and again in 1922 for Alice Adams. He is one of only three authors to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. Though Tarkington was educated at Princeton University, his works are strongly grounded in his native Indiana.