The Rover Boys at School Or, The Cadets of Putnam Hall

Stratemeyer, Edward, 1862-1930Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
268K words
Chapters
27

Tags

English Originals Children's Literature Campus LifeGrowing UpYouthful VibeStudent ReadingYouth Reading

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Rover Boys at School; Or, The Cadets of Putnam Hall by Edward StratemeyerAuthor: Stratemeyer, Edward, 1862-1930,Language: English, Class: PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres, Release Date: May 1, 2004

Editor's review

The Rover Boys at School is an early school adventure novel by Edward Stratemeyer, part of the juvenile series tradition that would later become widely influential. The story follows the Rover boys as they enter Putnam Hall military academy, combining school life, comradeship, and lighthearted adventure. The pace is brisk, the chapters are short, and the book bears clear marks of its era. As a public-domain ebook, it preserves the narrative voice and values of early twentieth-century juvenile fiction and is useful for studying the evolution of the genre and the rise of series-based publishing for young readers. It is best read as a historical text: enjoy its easy adventure while noticing how ideas of discipline, honor, and male growth are shaped. Suitable as extensive reading material in English or as a supplementary text in the history of juvenile literature; readers seeking complex characterization or modern narrative technique should look elsewhere.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read one or two chapters a day to keep an easy extensive-reading pace; do not look up every word.
  2. Mark unfamiliar period expressions and look them up after finishing a chapter, so reading is not interrupted.
  3. Read background on the development of juvenile series fiction to understand its place in the genre.
  4. For English study, retell a passage to practice summarizing narrative.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27

FAQ

Is this book suitable for English beginners to read directly? Not for complete beginners. Although it is a juvenile book, it was written in the early twentieth century, so its sentence patterns and vocabulary carry period features, and some expressions differ from contemporary English. It suits readers with intermediate reading ability who can tolerate some unfamiliar words, ideally with a dictionary or an annotated edition.
How is this book different from an ordinary school novel? It belongs to early juvenile series fiction, focused on comradeship, school discipline, and light adventure, with short chapters and fast pacing, and it carries clear period values. Compared with contemporary school novels, its characterization is simpler and closer to a genre adventure read; enjoy it for the story while keeping its historical context in mind.
Do I need to know the author's other works to read this book? No. The plot is relatively self-contained and can be read directly. If you are interested in how juvenile series fiction was published, you can learn about the historical background of such series writing afterward; there is no need to read other works first.

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About the author

Stratemeyer, Edward, 1862-1930 Author

Edward Stratemeyer (Stratemeyer, Edward, 1862-1930) was a writer and planner of far-reaching influence in the history of American juvenile publishing; the library holds seventy-eight of his works, commonly classified under inspirational coming-of-age stories. Public information about his life is limited, but his representative works reveal a clear creative orientation: taking youthful adventure as the main thread and weaving commercial pursuits, treasure-hunting expeditions, overseas military service, and frontier marches into coming-of-age narratives, as seen in the Rover Boys and Dave Porter series and in works involving ocean voyages and the Japanese navy. These stories move briskly, are full of suspense, and emphasize courage, honesty, and responsibility, catering to the reading tastes of young readers of the time. His writing model and series-based approach exerted a considerable influence on the production of American juvenile adventure fiction in the twentieth century.