Being a Boy

Warner, Charles Dudley, 1829-1900Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.5

Word count: 193K words
Chapters: 20

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.Being a Boy by Charles Dudley WarnerAuthor: Warner, Charles Dudley, 1829-1900,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Apr 27, 2017

Editor's review

Being a Boy is an essayistic memoir by Charles Dudley Warner recalling his childhood, looking back as an adult on farm life, schoolboy escapades, and family rules. The tone is gentle and humorous, steeped in the flavor of nineteenth-century New England. Its appeal lies not in plot but in detail: seasonal labor, country games, and boyhood feelings are rendered with ease and restraint, and readers can feel a nostalgia free of sentimentality. As a public-domain ebook, it is short and well suited to slow reading in spare moments, and also serves as an introductory text for understanding nineteenth-century American childhood writing and essay style. Read it slowly and treat it as a sketch of manners rather than a coming-of-age novel; readers unfamiliar with the details of rural life of the time may find some passages flat, but it is precisely in those flat passages that the texture of the era shows most clearly.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who enjoy nineteenth-century American essays and memoirs
Those interested in childhood writing and rural life and customs
Readers looking for short, plainly written English public-domain works for reading practice
Students studying the history of American local life and the history of childhood culture

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting strong plot and fast-paced narrative
Readers who prefer contemporary subjects and contemporary language
Those with weak English who need sentence-by-sentence notes

Reading tips

Read chapter by chapter, and after each chapter recall the corresponding scenes from your own childhood.
Note the details of labor, games, and family rules, and make brief excerpts.
Read alongside other nineteenth-century American childhood memoirs and compare the differences in tone.
When encountering unfamiliar words for customs, first infer from context, then look them up together, to avoid frequent interruptions.

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.

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a memoir?

It is closer to essayistic writing based on memory, centered on the daily life of boyhood, rather than a novel driven by invented plot. Expect fragmentary sketches of manners and the narrator's personal perspective rather than a complete storyline.

Is the English difficult? Is it suitable for reading practice?

The language is generally plain and the sentences are not long, but it contains nineteenth-century usage and rural vocabulary, requiring a certain vocabulary size. It is suitable as extensive reading material for readers who can already read general English essays; beginners are advised to use a dictionary and slow down.

Why does the plot feel so thin?

The work focuses on details of life and narrative tone rather than dramatic conflict, so the weak sense of plot is inherent to the text. Adjust your expectations and read it as a sketch of period manners; it then becomes easier to appreciate its humor and warmth.

Comments

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About the author

Warner, Charles Dudley, 1829-1900 Author

Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900) was an American writer and editor, with fifty-seven of his works held in this catalog. His subjects are notably wide-ranging: there are familiar essays on gardening and everyday leisure such as My Summer in a Garden, a study of a fellow writer in Washington Irving, and travel accounts of foreign places, including In the Levant, My Winter on the Nile and Our Italy, the last concerning Italy. The chapters associated with The Gilded Age indicate that he also took part in writing on social themes. The catalog classifies him under inspirational growth, suggesting that some of his works carry a tone of counsel and self-reflection. Public information is limited, so rather than dwelling on biographical detail, readers may begin with his essays and travel writings and appreciate their easy, unhurried style and close observation.