Penrod

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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