Stover at Yale

Dink Stover was introduced to readers in earlier volumes of the Lawrenceville Stories as a brash young newcomer whose biggest ambition is to play football for his school. At the start of Stover at Yale he seems much the same, arriving at the prestigious university determined to captain the football team, earn a place in the most prestigious secret society, and generally become the hero of a much less interesting novel. Gradually, though, the novel shifts its focus, as both Stover and the novel move outside the comfortable world of Stover's prep school chums and examine the ways in which the school fails to live up to its "democratic" ideals. Johnson never abandons the form of the school novel, but he stretches it to include types of heroism beyond the football field. The novel's criticism of Yale's powerful and prestigious secret societies caused controversy on its release, but it was more than a succès de scandale. Its unique combination of convention and ambition captured the public imagination, and for decades afterwards Dink Stover was shorthand for a certain type of undergraduate. The book is referenced even today by writers on American college life, and even put in an appearance in a 1996 episode of The Simpsons. Part campus novel, part coming-of-age story, Stover at Yale follows a football hero's education in the unwritten rules of privilege, ambition, and conscience that governed America's elite universities. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)