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The Lawrenceville Stories #1-3
The Lawrenceville Stories
Presents the three classic works which depict the school day escapades of Dink Stover, Doc Macnooder, and the Tennessee Shad
326 pages, Paperback
First published September 20, 1967
About the author
Owen Johnson
39 books7 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Owen McMahon Johnson was an American writer best remembered for his stories and novels cataloguing the educational and personal growth of the fictional character Dink Stover. The "Lawrenceville Stories" (The Prodigious Hickey, The Tennessee Shad, The Varmint, Skippy Bedelle, The Hummingbird), set in the well-known prep school, invite comparison with Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co. A 1950 film, The Happy Years, and a 1987 PBS mini-series, The Lawrenceville Stories, were based on them.
Owen McMahon Johnson was an American writer best remembered for his stories and novels cataloguing the educational and personal growth of the fictional character Dink Stover. The "Lawrenceville Stories" (The Prodigious Hickey, The Tennessee Shad, The Varmint, Skippy Bedelle, The Hummingbird), set in the well-known prep school, invite comparison with Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co. A 1950 film, The Happy Years, and a 1987 PBS mini-series, The Lawrenceville Stories, were based on them.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 12, 2021
The world of The Lawrenceville Stories is one in which the very characters themselves understand that they exist in a world destined for lore and legend, filled with triumphant feats and perfect, glorious sobriquets. As a result, their various imaginations of glory, or, failing that, notoriety, or at the very least being known, are portrayed, alongside their own sense of school history, of which they are not necessarily yet a part. The sense of continuing patterns, such as mentions of “the hereditary possessor” of a set of passkeys and the established use of a given window as “the highway to the outer world,” orient us, like new students, to an environment firmly in place long before the beginning of the book and destined to continue on long after its ending. It is for this reason—because of the school’s enduring legacy—that we are granted a set of characters intent on perpetuating and enhancing that legacy, as reflected in a series of events that demonstrate how single days, and single incidents on single days, add to and burnish an already storied history.
This results in a feat of world-building that most novelists can only hope to achieve, a completeness of setting, physical and tonal, that makes the book feel like home; rather than continually trying to forcibly create connections between his stories, Johnson effortlessly reveals them, as if offhandedly, from the very beginning. This allows him to focus primarily on the specifics of each episode, each of which is like a stained-glass pictorial in its precise rendering of a given incident. There is a perfection to the formal tone, which renders with a light touch of irony a careful and precise portrayal of carefree rambunctiousness; the loftiness of the recounting reflects the characters’ opinions of themselves and their place in the world, and lends The Lawrenceville Stories a mood of self-consciously literate myth-making.
Johnson enhances the reader’s pleasure by sometimes only suggesting the nature of mischief gotten up to, and other times offering a trail of bread crumbs before a revelation, granting the reader the satisfaction of anticipation (while also having the wisdom to also often create scenarios where there is the possibility of things going awry, prompting a sense of both thrill and dread); this is only part of the pleasure, naturally, as the various ingenuities and exploits are themselves pleasing in the characters’ design and execution thereof. Particularly enjoyable is the amount of effort on behalf of the characters, and the amount of pages in the book, given over to trivial pursuits, like the hours spent developing ways to shave seconds off of their morning routines in order to prolong their stays in bed; the beauty of even the events great enough to become the stuff of lore is how often they, too, begin as trivial, before ascending due to the specifics of how they play out.
This also works in reverse, as when those episodes that seem enormously momentous in a negative manner are revealed to ultimately fade quickly from memory in the larger scheme of events, whereas the positivity accumulates in a more genuinely lasting way. Johnson is able to portray an astonishing range of emotions, and rhymes the changes that come with age to different characters, and cleverly mirrors real life in the way that these changes come not as a result of the objective process of aging, but by way of interaction with those older, both students and masters. Johnson presents the Lawrenceville of his stories as a preordained continuum of greatness, extending beyond sight and memory forward and backward, perpetuated Form after Form by individuals who carve out for themselves unique niches like doctoral students determining for themselves an unexamined field of inquiry; when Smeed is asked, upon arrival and on the basis of his famished appearance, “Well, Hungry—what’s your name?”, the question is asked and answered with perfect efficiency, as if Hungry Smeed has kept his appointment with his destiny, and now that he has assumed his rightful name, he can next complete the feats meant to be associated with it.
The positioning of The Tennessee Shad as the last of the three component books, with its chronology carefully overlapping that of The Prodigious Hickey followed by that of The Varmint, is a smart nod to the particular interplay between the old(er) guard and the new, mapping how such legends and customs come into being and are passed along, as new blood—a mix of those who eagerly embrace and refine tradition, finding their modest place in a proud lineage, and those of rarer breeds, who, like the Tennessee Shad, "bequeathed precedents rather than followed them," on each of whom an entire narrative could be centered—is injected into the student body and those graduating (or meeting more notorious ends) pass on into immortality, either unassumingly (rising like Stover to a position of responsibility, appraising incoming students in much the same manner as he himself was appraised, and presumably), by conscious choice (like the Tennessee Shad and Doc Macnooder disbanding their firm with the understanding that it, like their tenures at Lawrenceville, cannot continue forever), or decidedly not by choice at all (like the Prodigious Hickey, the ingeniousness of whose dismissal is perhaps the only one suitable enough for someone as ingenious as himself, and an all-time masterwork when it comes to the devising of an ending).
This results in a feat of world-building that most novelists can only hope to achieve, a completeness of setting, physical and tonal, that makes the book feel like home; rather than continually trying to forcibly create connections between his stories, Johnson effortlessly reveals them, as if offhandedly, from the very beginning. This allows him to focus primarily on the specifics of each episode, each of which is like a stained-glass pictorial in its precise rendering of a given incident. There is a perfection to the formal tone, which renders with a light touch of irony a careful and precise portrayal of carefree rambunctiousness; the loftiness of the recounting reflects the characters’ opinions of themselves and their place in the world, and lends The Lawrenceville Stories a mood of self-consciously literate myth-making.
Johnson enhances the reader’s pleasure by sometimes only suggesting the nature of mischief gotten up to, and other times offering a trail of bread crumbs before a revelation, granting the reader the satisfaction of anticipation (while also having the wisdom to also often create scenarios where there is the possibility of things going awry, prompting a sense of both thrill and dread); this is only part of the pleasure, naturally, as the various ingenuities and exploits are themselves pleasing in the characters’ design and execution thereof. Particularly enjoyable is the amount of effort on behalf of the characters, and the amount of pages in the book, given over to trivial pursuits, like the hours spent developing ways to shave seconds off of their morning routines in order to prolong their stays in bed; the beauty of even the events great enough to become the stuff of lore is how often they, too, begin as trivial, before ascending due to the specifics of how they play out.
This also works in reverse, as when those episodes that seem enormously momentous in a negative manner are revealed to ultimately fade quickly from memory in the larger scheme of events, whereas the positivity accumulates in a more genuinely lasting way. Johnson is able to portray an astonishing range of emotions, and rhymes the changes that come with age to different characters, and cleverly mirrors real life in the way that these changes come not as a result of the objective process of aging, but by way of interaction with those older, both students and masters. Johnson presents the Lawrenceville of his stories as a preordained continuum of greatness, extending beyond sight and memory forward and backward, perpetuated Form after Form by individuals who carve out for themselves unique niches like doctoral students determining for themselves an unexamined field of inquiry; when Smeed is asked, upon arrival and on the basis of his famished appearance, “Well, Hungry—what’s your name?”, the question is asked and answered with perfect efficiency, as if Hungry Smeed has kept his appointment with his destiny, and now that he has assumed his rightful name, he can next complete the feats meant to be associated with it.
The positioning of The Tennessee Shad as the last of the three component books, with its chronology carefully overlapping that of The Prodigious Hickey followed by that of The Varmint, is a smart nod to the particular interplay between the old(er) guard and the new, mapping how such legends and customs come into being and are passed along, as new blood—a mix of those who eagerly embrace and refine tradition, finding their modest place in a proud lineage, and those of rarer breeds, who, like the Tennessee Shad, "bequeathed precedents rather than followed them," on each of whom an entire narrative could be centered—is injected into the student body and those graduating (or meeting more notorious ends) pass on into immortality, either unassumingly (rising like Stover to a position of responsibility, appraising incoming students in much the same manner as he himself was appraised, and presumably), by conscious choice (like the Tennessee Shad and Doc Macnooder disbanding their firm with the understanding that it, like their tenures at Lawrenceville, cannot continue forever), or decidedly not by choice at all (like the Prodigious Hickey, the ingeniousness of whose dismissal is perhaps the only one suitable enough for someone as ingenious as himself, and an all-time masterwork when it comes to the devising of an ending).
August 17, 2021
The Lawrenceville Stories are part of the genre of boys' prep school tales like Kipling's Stalkey & Co. They hark back to a probably apocryphal time when boys were boys, arrayed against the "masters" as the teachers were known, and learning was purely incidental. No one had to worry about getting into college or getting a job. Life was sweet, marred only by the fear of what their fellow students might do to them if they crossed an invisible line.
The book is actually three Owen Johnson books in one, The Varmint, The Prodigious Hickey and The Tennessee Shad. As the reader will see on the first page, no one in these books except the adults used their real names. A nickname was bestowed upon the hapless kid first wandering into Lawrenceville. If he was unlucky, brash and did not show proper deference to his elders, he might get a nickname like The Uncooked Beefsteak. If he showed promise on the football team, he might be christened Butcher. Some nicknames are never explained. The reader never learns how The Waladoo Bird, who apparently was a real person, got his name.
The book takes place at Lawrenceville School, outside of Trenton, New Jersey in the 1890s. While the boys wouldn't be at the school if they weren't part of the upper classes, ostentatious displays of wealth are frowned on and exploited by the more mercenary characters, in order to teach new boys a lesson. All the teasing and what would be called hazing today is in the service of building character.
I like these kind of books because they are colorful and provide a window into what a little slice of life was like long ago. I'm sure many people have issues with them. Sexism, racism (the Lawrenceville boys periodically broke out at night and ran through "Negro settlements," creating a ruckus and upsetting the dogs, no thought given to the people inside the houses who had to get up the next day and work hard at menial jobs for little money) classism, and a "boys will be boys" attitude which works fine in fiction but less well in real life.
The book is actually three Owen Johnson books in one, The Varmint, The Prodigious Hickey and The Tennessee Shad. As the reader will see on the first page, no one in these books except the adults used their real names. A nickname was bestowed upon the hapless kid first wandering into Lawrenceville. If he was unlucky, brash and did not show proper deference to his elders, he might get a nickname like The Uncooked Beefsteak. If he showed promise on the football team, he might be christened Butcher. Some nicknames are never explained. The reader never learns how The Waladoo Bird, who apparently was a real person, got his name.
The book takes place at Lawrenceville School, outside of Trenton, New Jersey in the 1890s. While the boys wouldn't be at the school if they weren't part of the upper classes, ostentatious displays of wealth are frowned on and exploited by the more mercenary characters, in order to teach new boys a lesson. All the teasing and what would be called hazing today is in the service of building character.
I like these kind of books because they are colorful and provide a window into what a little slice of life was like long ago. I'm sure many people have issues with them. Sexism, racism (the Lawrenceville boys periodically broke out at night and ran through "Negro settlements," creating a ruckus and upsetting the dogs, no thought given to the people inside the houses who had to get up the next day and work hard at menial jobs for little money) classism, and a "boys will be boys" attitude which works fine in fiction but less well in real life.
November 10, 2008
A book rich in detail and characterization, the tale of prep school boys in that agonizing boy/man stage of development. I recall the PBS series starring one of the Baldwin brothers; acted superbly but still pales in comparison to the novel, which is a combination of stories on Hickey and the Tennessee Shad. Even secondary characters get their moment in the sun, like Ironsides and Snooky. Prep schools and the early days of baseball had the market cornered on colorful nicknames...
My only critique would be the mashing of these stories as the book I purchased did not run the stories chronologically. Hickey is dismissed from school and then suddenly reappears without explanation.
I'm eager to read more of Johnson's stories of prep school life, and know there's a series on Dink Stover's progression from Lawrenceville to Yale.
My only critique would be the mashing of these stories as the book I purchased did not run the stories chronologically. Hickey is dismissed from school and then suddenly reappears without explanation.
I'm eager to read more of Johnson's stories of prep school life, and know there's a series on Dink Stover's progression from Lawrenceville to Yale.
December 1, 2014
This book contained two volumes, "The Prodigious Hickey" and "The Tennessee Shad." The first volume was great the second not so much.
April 2, 2019
The genre I understand, having been raised on Billy Bunter and similar tales
The Prodigious Hickey I found delightful, amusing, light, albeit with slightly arcane expressions that I managed to translate and become comfortable with
The Tennessee Shad might have had the same cast, but appeared to be by a different writer, in the Laura Lee Hope style of writing co-operative, yet I know the author is the same person. I suspect a period of several years elapsed between the two. I had to bulldoze my way through the second tale, and found it flat. It was overdone in some manner, contrived.
I realise I am not the target market, being English and in England, and I know that a century has elapsed between the time of the tale and the time of reading. The author died in the year I was born. Even so I expected to like the book more than 'half', the more so since it was recommended to me by a US friend who understands the cultural divide
The Prodigious Hickey I found delightful, amusing, light, albeit with slightly arcane expressions that I managed to translate and become comfortable with
The Tennessee Shad might have had the same cast, but appeared to be by a different writer, in the Laura Lee Hope style of writing co-operative, yet I know the author is the same person. I suspect a period of several years elapsed between the two. I had to bulldoze my way through the second tale, and found it flat. It was overdone in some manner, contrived.
I realise I am not the target market, being English and in England, and I know that a century has elapsed between the time of the tale and the time of reading. The author died in the year I was born. Even so I expected to like the book more than 'half', the more so since it was recommended to me by a US friend who understands the cultural divide
January 16, 2026
A nice way to start the year. I can't believe I've never run across this before, as my life as been littered with boarding schools. But these tales of pure boyish pranks and high jinks made me smile -- and sometimes laugh out loud -- in admiring recognition. That this slight book (and several more in the same vein) is still in print is testament to its skillful storytelling, creative flair, mock-elevated tone, and the eternal wat between the Boy and the Faculty. It's a treasure, and may it never go out of print.
January 29, 2015
This collection of stories provides a window into what life was like in a nineteenth century American boarding school. It proves beyond doubt that boys will be boys regardless of the era in which they become men. Owen Johnson, who attended the Lawrenceville School, writes masterfully on the subject of male camaraderie and what life was actually like among the young boys at the prestigious boarding school. Filled with characters with clever nicknames like, The Prodigious Hickey, The Tennessee Shad, The Varmint, Skippy Bedelle, The Hummingbird, Hungry and countless others, Johnson weaves engrossing tales of angst and adventure played out against a backdrop of a sophisticated world long lost.
Capturing the nostalgia of a Norman Rockwell painting, the stealth of The Hardy Boys, the inventiveness of Johnny Quest, and the daring of Indiana Jones, these stories detail the adventures of a group of boys who will stop at nothing in their quest to "best" one another and most especially the stodgy faculty with their obnoxious stunts. Led by the wonderfully crafty ringleader, The Prodigious Hickey, along with his one-time fierce rival and later partner in crime, The Tennessee Shad, these students pull unbelievable pranks on one another and unsuspecting faculty. Ultimately, the times these adolescent boys spend together will forge their paths into manhood. These stories are delightful, well crafted and laugh-out-loud funny!
Capturing the nostalgia of a Norman Rockwell painting, the stealth of The Hardy Boys, the inventiveness of Johnny Quest, and the daring of Indiana Jones, these stories detail the adventures of a group of boys who will stop at nothing in their quest to "best" one another and most especially the stodgy faculty with their obnoxious stunts. Led by the wonderfully crafty ringleader, The Prodigious Hickey, along with his one-time fierce rival and later partner in crime, The Tennessee Shad, these students pull unbelievable pranks on one another and unsuspecting faculty. Ultimately, the times these adolescent boys spend together will forge their paths into manhood. These stories are delightful, well crafted and laugh-out-loud funny!
October 22, 2021
Dunno why certain things in reading applications are trigger points, but a girl used the word "prodigious" in her essay and all I could think about was Hickey. It was very distracting and it took me a while to get through her essay. The Lawrenceville Stories and Stover at Yale were among the first to get me excited about what school could someday be for me. Carleton is definitely like boarding school in the early 1900s.
May 7, 2009
Classic! Written about my school! Probably more interesting to anyone who went there than anyone else, but these are some excellent period stories with lots of boyishness and tomfoolery written in. A view into the boarding school during a completely different era. Lots of fun.
March 8, 2012
A must read for any true Lawrentian!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews