Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly

First published: 1942

Type of work: Psychological realism

Themes: Love and romance, coming-of-age, family, nature, and education

Time of work: World War II

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: Fond du Lac and Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin

Principal Characters:

• Angeline “Angie” Morrow, a girl from a close family, who has just been graduated from high school and is preparing to go away to college
• Jack Duluth, a gentlemanly caller who works in his family’s bakery and dates Angie after breaking up with Jane Rady
• Margaret, Angie’s oldest sister, who is engaged to Art
• Lorraine, the sister who goes to college in Chicago
• Kitty, Angie’s youngest sister, who needs occasional babysitting
• Mrs. Morrow, the girls’ mother, a housewife
• Mr. Morrow, the father, a salesman
• Swede, Jack’s best friend who likes to sail
• Margie, and
• Fitz, teens who sometimes double date with Angie and Jack
• Martin Keefe, a two-timer who dates Lorraine
• Tony, an older boy with a fast reputation

The Story

This story of Angie, who grows up in a Midwestern town just between the Depression and World War II, sounds a quintessential note in American young adult fiction. Like its predecessor from the nineteenth century, Little Women (1868-1869) by Louisa May Alcott, Seventeenth Summer is a classic. A twentieth century account of another family of four sisters, it is a warm story; if the reader becomes the fifth sister, the book typically turns into a story of wish fulfillment. Angie is no Jo March (that is, a tomboy), but she is the writer in Maureen Daly’s book, and she has Jo’s dedication to education and her naivete around boys. Almost dazzled by being asked for a date by a popular athlete, Angie slowly begins growing into her future.

On their first date, Jack and Angie walk out to the lake where Jack and Swede Vincent keep a boat, and Jack lights a pipe while he thinks about life. When Angie thinks back to the specialness of her first date, she recalls the sheer happiness of living. Jack does smoke and drink, and before long, Angie is going to parties where there is drinking. In writing about these behaviors, Daly (perhaps unwittingly) helped prepare the way not only for a subsequent writer for teenagers, S. E. Hinton (The Outsiders, 1967), but also for the disappearance of almost all young adult print taboos, beginning late in the 1960’s.

Angie discovers that agony soon follows ecstasy: At Pete’s (the local gathering place for young adults), Jack dances with his former steady, Jane Rady, even though he had brought Angie. A crisis of confidence comes over Angie, who imagines that all other girls simply know how to act around boys. Still, her mind drifts back to the wonder of that first starry night with Jack.

The sexual revolution has not taken away the magic of first kisses, and Angie enjoys both anticipating and remembering hers. Her sexuality is coupled with a healthy eroticism. In love with life, she yearns to learn and explore; consequently, she experiences the pain of growing: “. . . I could not help wishing that there wasn’t so much sadness in growing up.” She has ambition, more than Jack, who favors physical work although he says that his ultimate ambition is to be a pilot.

No doubt one of the reasons that young readers have kept this book in print is that they can identify with Angie, who expresses the hopes of many a young girl. She challenges Jack to “start now to work on ourselves so we would be, maybe, great people when we grow up.” Whatever the year, that is a liberated young lady speaking.

Angie and Jack end August at cross purposes: He wants physical love, whereas she can wait. At the last party of the summer, he leads her away from the circle by the fireside into the dark, where the luxuriance is Keatsian. He proposes.

The next day is cold, like autumn. No longer is Angie able to keep the swiftness of the passing of time out of her awareness, a sign of her waning youth. On the way to college, with Jack’s class ring, a ring she first noticed him wear one June night in church, she also knows that nothing will ever quite match the wonder of summer at seventeen.

Context

Daly’s astonishing achievement is that she began the book at age seventeen and finished it at twenty. Although modern young adult literature emerged in the 1960’s, Daly actually began the modern period of young adult writing in the early 1940’s. Some forty years later, as a grandmother, she wrote Acts of Love (1986), the story of her daughter’s seventeenth summer, when Megan fell in love with a cowboy. From a farm in Pennsylvania, the family in this book moves to California when a highway construction project cuts through their land. Dallas Dobson heads west too.

Critics early recognized the classic stature of Seventeenth Summer, and as years passed, May Hill Arbuthnot noted in 1969 that “if the title...were changed to Fifteenth Summer, the entertaining story would seem as contemporary as the day it was published.” As the decades go by, the appropriate beginning reading age lowers, because the onset of menarche has been dropping approximately one year per generation since 1850.

As late as the mid-1980’s Nilsen and Donelson could write, “Many girls who read Seventeenth Summer come away with the feeling that they are reading a slightly old-fashioned, but contemporary, novel.” Such a statement remains true: The book seems to have the luck of the Irish. Adolescence may not be universal (although puberty is), but when a story told by a young girl who is moving through the passage from childhood to adulthood not only mirrors this experience for generations of women but also does so in an artistic way with appropriate leitmotifs, then that story is likely to be a text that lives in time and over time. That is why Seventeenth Summer is a classic.