Seventeen

Description

Seventeen is a very difficult age – nobody knows it better than Booth Tarkington, one out of the three writers ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize on more than one occasions. Though the author’s Pulitzers were not for this book – he received one for his Alice Adams and one for The Magnificent Ambersons -Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summer Time offers the reader great entertainment, a humorous, satirical, yet kind and loving take of what adolescence means and of how dramatic the first love in one’s life can be.No wonder the book became a bestseller in an instant when it was published.

The protagonist of the book is William Baxter, a seventeen-year-old youth who is on his summer vacation in a small town in the American Midwest when he meets and instantly falls in love with Lola Pratt, a young lady of the same age who has come to visit William’s neighbors. The story revolves around his courtship of beautiful and flirtatious Lola and eventually ends with the young lady leaving town when the summer vacation is over.

Many of the book’s critics praised Seventeen for the loving, understanding, yet sharp and very accurate account it offers about adolescence. The book does indeed remind the reader what it felt like to be an adolescent in a moving and detailed manner, with lots of humor and a touch of irony at times.

The book has enjoyed a really long-lived popularity. It was first published in 1916 and, since then, it was made into a silent film (in the same year that the book came out), a theater play, a musical entitled Hello, Lola!,released in 1918, and another onein 1951, bearing the original title, as well as a radio show created by Orson Welles in 1938.
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