Jack Hall : or, The school days of an American boy by Robert Grant

Jack Hall by Robert Grant is a novel written in the late 19th century. It centers on the spirited schooldays of a Boston boy, Jack Hall, tracing his pranks, friendships, and formative scrapes as he inches toward greater responsibility. Expect brisk episodes of winter sport and street mischief, a tight-knit circle of boys, and the tension between boyish daring and a devoted mother’s guidance. The opening of the novel drops us into Washington’s Birthday in Boston, where thirteen-year-old Jack revels in snowballing a grocer’s clerk, hitching behind sleighs, candy-shop indulgences, and headlong coasting that ends in a spill. He and his friends wage a raucous neighborhood snowball battle against “muckers,” with Jack toppling the feared Joe Herring before a policeman disperses the fray. That evening they feast at home and pull off nocturnal pranks—chalk “letters,” a bell-string trip that humiliates a stern neighbor—while Jack candidly admits to his mother that he tried smoking rattan. By morning he has measles, the grocer arrives to protest ongoing mischief and petty pilfering, and Jack’s mother reflects on his forebears, the limits of city boyhood, and whether a country school might better shape his character. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Read or download for free

For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide

Reading Options Url Size
Read now! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77143.html.images 486 kB
EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77143.epub3.images 3.2 MB
EPUB (older E-readers) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77143.epub.images 3.2 MB
EPUB (no images, older E-readers) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77143.epub.noimages 540 kB
Kindle https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77143.kf8.images 3.9 MB
older Kindles https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77143.kindle.images 3.8 MB
Plain Text UTF-8 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77143.txt.utf-8 440 kB
Download HTML (zip) https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77143/pg77143-h.zip 3.4 MB
There may be more files related to this item.

About this eBook

Author Grant, Robert, 1852-1940
Illustrator Attwood, Francis Gilbert, 1856-1900
Title Jack Hall : or, The school days of an American boy
Original Publication Boston: Jordan, Marsh and Company, 1887.
Credits Produced by Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net
Language English
LoC Class PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres
Subject Christian life -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Boys -- Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Schools -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Baseball -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Children -- Death -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Friendship -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Boys -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Boarding schools -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Students -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Mothers and sons -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Sick -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Sports stories
Subject Awards -- Juvenile fiction
Subject Tobacco -- Juvenile fiction
Category Text
EBook-No. 77143
Release Date
Copyright Status Public domain in the USA.
Downloads 262 downloads in the last 30 days.
Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free!