It should be no surprise, if Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes, finds its way into the upper "rare" stratosphere of literary excellence. Lauded ever since it first appeared, it continues to be read and regarded as a fine historical novel. It is a book much praised, but it has not, as far as I know, been critically examined. (p. 139) Basically, the story is one of character development, of a boy's struggle with his feelings of inferiority and worth, his attempts to find a place for himsel...

Only a master craftsman, and one who has worked so much in the period that it has become a kind of second home in time, would dare to undertake that most familiar of themes—Boston at the outbreak of the war. Such a novelist is Esther Forbes and to ["Johnny Tremain"] she brings such freshness and vitality that one reads it with the avidity with which one follows today's news, with the extra dividend of pleasurable recognition of half forgotten episodes thrown in. The reason, of co...

[Johnny Tremain has an] inspirational note: 'We fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.'… [It] is a true historical novel, concerned with actual historical events; and it seems to me (though not for this reason) that it has true classic quality. I have the impression that the author may even have known she was writing a classic; for Johnny Tremain has an air of absolute sureness and solidity; like one of its redoubtable New Englanders it knows where it is going ...

[Johnny Tremain] is a natural for the Bicentennial year. Students can identify with Johnny, for his was the arrogance of today. He plunged heart and soul into the rebellious spirit of his time. His quick temper and his cocksure air (for he was a clever boy) make him so human and alive that Johnny carries with him whole classrooms of youngsters who learn to feel and to experience that Spirit of '76. No other book about early America can cast the spell that Johnny Tremain does…. The thrill, the ...

Johnny Tremain, with its message of ideologically motivated war, is so much the product of World War II that one who grew up in the 1940's must honor its clear one-sidedness. Younger historians, products of the 1960's who are currently busy reviving the Progressive interpretation of a generation ago, would be less tolerant. But without denying its outstanding literary merit, Miss Forbes' presentation of the American Revolution does not pass muster as serious, professional history. Not s...

The publication of Johnny Tremain gives young people an outstanding novel of Revolutionary days in Boston, and may well be counted a red-letter event in children's books. Esther Forbes has now preserved for young people's reading some of the very background of her Paul Revere, with its details of domestic life, its penetrating knowledge of colonial Boston, its perception of character, its artistry…. Johnny's personal story, however, holds absorbed attention throughout the book. F...

If Jonathan Lyte Tremain never lived in the flesh, he lives vividly with the men of his time in [Johnny Tremain]. So we dare to put him among the people of importance…. This story of Johnny Tremain is almost uncanny in its "aliveness." Esther Forbes's power to create, and to recreate, a face, a voice, a scene takes us as living spectators to the Boston Tea Party, to the Battles of Lexington and of North Creek. It takes us, with Johnny, to the secret meetings of the Sons of Libert...

The sub-title [of "Johnny Tremain"], "a novel for old or young," will serve if you bear in mind that the young will read for Johnny's sake and the old for the sake of Esther Forbes. Here is history treated with a realism that may be an eye-opener to boys' books. The Revolution goes through the story with a rush and scramble and in its surge men and boys alike are caught up. The inside of people's minds often has as much to do with the story as the outside lay...

[Johnny Tremain] was first published in the United States in 1943 and is now accepted as a classic in both our countries. [Fisher is a British critic.] It deserves the title because the author has so skilfully related personal and national issues, but far more because in Johnny she has created a very real person, a boy whose faults are first his undoing and then his salvation. To see a self-satisfied boy become a man, under stress, is just as exciting as it is to read of how the ideal of freedom was fought ...

Johnny Tremain may well be counted the first classic story of Boston for young people. This is not alone because of the accurate picture of the pre-Revolutionary town, with its wandering streets and busy wharves, its crafts and trades, markets and merchants, nor because of the rich abundance of details about the manners of the period, its ways of living and customs of trade, nor even because it is an arresting portrayal of the stubborn resistance of the Patriots and townspeople against arbitrary acts of the...