Dick, Tom, Sam

Will There Be Rover Boys in Utopia Too?

The Story* Sequels seem to be out of favor with most prominent American authors -- heaven knows why! Hergesheimer, Lewis, Gather, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Dos Passes, et cetera -- not one of them seems to care about carrying his or her characters through more than a single volume. Except for James Branch Cabell with his elaborate lineage of Lichfield, the pleasant custom of introducing a favorite character from one book into another seems for the present to have fallen into desuetude among us, at least among the more pretentious of our writers. Which makes it all the more pleasant to come across a volume which is not merely a sequel but a sequel to the nth power -- the 27th item in a series of books that has sold three million copies already -- the continuous, timeless story of the adventures of a typically American family, which for sheer length makes James Joyce's Ulysses seem like a preface. We refer, of course, to the latest segment of the Rover saga -- The Rover Boys at Big Bear Lake or The Camps of the Rival Cadets.

The Rovers are as American as The Saturday Evening Post -- and yet they are neither Babbitts, beautiful, damned nor Gopher Prairie yokels. They are merely what the average American boy between ten and sixteen would like to be, and they do the things which that boy would like to do. The wandering Patagonian musing on the ruins of Brooklyn Bridge in the year 3,000 could reconstruct every external of our present life and civilization from this series of books, as well as most of our ideals. He would think our normal life a little more exciting than it is, but that is all.

Mr. Stratemeyer says in his preface: "My Dear Boys . . . This line of books was started years ago with The Rover Boys at School . . . in which I introduced Dick, Tom and Sam Rover and their chums and relatives. . . . Having finished their education, the three young men established themselves in business and became married (to boyhood sweethearts). Later Dick Rover was blessed with a son and daughter, as was also his brother Sam, while the fun-loving Tom became the father of a pair of lively twin boys." Dick, Tom, and Sam now live in adjacent dwellings on Riverside Drive. They would. And all three are in business in Wall Street -- with The Rover Company, Inc. -- and undoubtedly they lunch together on crackers-and-milk, that manna of the American business man, and they have the newest radio sets and sometimes get Cuba on them--they brush their teeth with the newest well advertised dentifrice--just solid, honest, Godfearing, 100% Americans

The present opus concerns their progeny--and the virtues of the fathers are visited upon their sons. Athletes who never fail to win the game in the ninth inning, jolly-good-fellows, fond of an honest roughhouse, chivalrous to the weaker sex, lovers of God's outdoors, their simple lives are a constant succession of triumphs over scheming bullies at a rival military academy, bears, wildcats, inertia and German plotters who attempt to purloin an important dye formula from an old friend of the Rover family. From the time when an aeroplane (not driven by a Rover or there would have been no accident) crashes into a lake in the first chapter till the last (which holds promise of yet another sequel, The Rover Boys Shipwrecked or A Thrilling Hunt for Pirate's Gold), all is frolic, action and fun. True sons of their parents, these--not a complex or a suppressed desire in a barrel of them. "And here, while the Rover boys and their chums are getting ready to give the girls a glorious good time, we will say good-bye."

The Significance. This is what your boy really likes to read, out of all the world's literature, unless he's a prodigy, and what you liked to read when you were his age. Imagine a family library without at least one volume containing the glorious words "A cooky-prize," cried Dick Rover, "for whoever first sights the old school!"

The Author. Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer) is one of the most prolific and popular writers of boys' books in the world. Besides the Rover Boys Series he is also the author of the Putnam Hall Stories.

*THE ROVER BOYS AT BIG BEAR LAKE Arthtur M. Winfleld (Edward Stratemeyer) -- Grosset and Dunlap ($.85).