The Penrod series features a boy, Penrod Schofield, who lives in the period just before World War I, when, in Tarkington's words, "the stable was empty but not yet rebuilt into a garage." Few Americans today can imagine a time when most families did not own an automobile, so Penrod and the two succeeding volumes are valuable period studies, as are practically all of Tarkington's novels. Penrod tells what it meant to be a boy in the years 19001917, much as The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1951) provides an example of the psychology of an early 1950s teenager.