Novel: Seventeen

Premise and Setting
Seventeen follows William Sylvanus Baxter, a painfully earnest seventeen-year-old navigating the awkward, deliciously comic territory between adolescence and adulthood in an early 20th-century Midwestern town. He lives with his family in a comfortable middle-class household and moves through the routines of school, home, and the small-town social scene with the intense self-consciousness and inflated seriousness typical of that age. The era's manners, social expectations, and petty hierarchies frame his misadventures and provide much of the novel's gentle humor.
William's chief preoccupation is his infatuation with a local girl, Lola Pratt, whose attention and approval he desperately seeks. His efforts to appear mature and alluring, to himself far more than to anyone else, drive the narrative: rehearsed phrases, fancied acts of gallantry, awkward courtship attempts and the private dramas he constructs in his imagination. The setting is never obtrusive; instead, it supplies the small social stages on which William's grand emotional gestures and mortifying blunders play out.

Plot and Key Episodes
The novel unfolds as a sequence of episodes that follow William's increasingly elaborate attempts to be taken for a man rather than a boy. He practices conversational bravado, composes solemn letters, and stages scenes designed to impress Lola and his peers. Each scheme reveals more about his earnestness than his sophistication: he is more theatrical dreamer than polished suitor. The comedy arises from the contrast between his self-image and the reality of his social standing.
Along the way William collides with a roster of characters who reflect and refract his anxieties, family members who oscillate between indulgence and exasperation, friends who alternate between conspirators and rivals, and the object of his affection, whose responses are ambiguous and often baffling to him. Moments that feel climactic for William, dances, parlor encounters, public displays, tend to collapse into confusion or gentle humiliation, each puncture nudging him incrementally toward a clearer sense of himself.

Themes and Tone
Seventeen is a coming-of-age story that treats adolescence with affectionate satire rather than cruelty. The principal theme is the gap between romantic self-conception and social reality: William's passionate interior life collides repeatedly with the petty commerce of small-town manners. Tarkington balances mockery of teenage pretension with sympathy for the sincere emotions that fuel it; William's foibles are sources of laughter and pity in equal measure.
Other themes include the rituals of social standing, the performance of gendered adulthood, and the gradual relinquishment of adolescent absolutisms. The novel captures how rites of passage, dance partners, declarations of love, and the small tests of courage, function as training ground for adult life. The tone is nostalgic without being sentimental, observant without being harsh, creating a portrait of youth that feels both specific to its time and timeless in its portrayal of first love and first disillusionments.

Style and Legacy
Tarkington's prose is economical, anecdotal and warmly ironic, built from a series of vivid vignettes that reveal character through speech and small actions rather than extended philosophical reflection. The narrative voice hovers between amused omniscience and tender closeness to William's consciousness, allowing readers to laugh at his mistakes while still feeling for him. Period details, fashion, manners, domestic routines, are sketched with an eye for the particular, making the social world come alive.
Seventeen became a widely read depiction of American adolescence, admired for its humor and humane insight. Its influence lies less in plot than in its method: an intimate, scene-driven study of youthful self-importance and the gradual process of growth. The novel endures because it recognizes that the most serious things in life can be, for a time, heartbreakingly comic.