Lawrenceville Stories

By Owen Johnson

Set in the late 1800s, this is a collection of humorous stories about the antics of a group of schoolboys at the Lawrenceville School,  a prep school located near Trenton, New Jersey. The author was a student at Lawrenceville School and some of the incidents related in his stories may have some basis in reality.
Whether that is true or not, the stories give an inside look at the recreational life of the students, much of which revolved around sports. And for the main characters, much of their time is spent trying to acquire money or pull off pranks.

This was an OK read. As I said above, one of the main endeavors of the students was sports, and quite a few of the stories are concerned with this, which made it rather boring for me, since I am not interested in sports or stories about sports. Also, many of the stories were about boys running scams on their fellow students, which, while marginally more interesting than the sports stories, still didn't hold much appeal for me. I think maybe I am the wrong audience for this book. I don't think it was a bad book, it just wasn't my kind of read.