A boyhood in old New York, told in the third person, and the four dogs who saw its owner through it.
Laurence Hutton (1843-1904) was literary editor of Harper's Magazine and, later, a lecturer at Princeton. A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs, published in 1898, is his memoir of a nineteenth-century New York childhood - written at an amused distance, about a boy he claims only to have known - followed by the lives of four dogs he owned himself. Nothing here has been invented, he insists in the preface, and the histories of the boy and the dogs are true from beginning to end.
It is a gentle, funny, unexpectedly moving book, and one of the best surviving accounts of what it was like to grow up in that city, in that century, with a dog at your heel.
This edition features:
- A memoir of an old New York boyhood, first published in 1898
- Four canine lives, told by a man who knew each of them personally
- Written by the literary editor of Harper's Magazine, at the centre of American letters
- A short, warm read for anyone who has grown up with a dog