Work of Art by Sinclair Lewis

Not the triumph of entering college, nor even the triumph of a broker receiving his LL.D. degree from Muskingum College as a recognition of piety and generosity, is so satisfying an academic victory as emerging into high-school Sophomoredom. Sophomores are admitted now to be men and women, and they are still certain, on misinformation and belief derived from their parents, that it is worth while to become adults and have the privileges of shaving and bearing babies and tending the furnace and belching after meals. It is now that the boys are expected to smoke, though perhaps secretly, and the girls to have fellers and silk stockings.

Though most of his energy and his ideas were absorbed by the American House, now that he was fifteen and a Sophomore, Myron found high school diverting. The physical background was fairly bad. Not yet had New England towns discovered that the young can be educated only in a milieu of tapestry brick, Vita glass, $100,000 swimming pools, gymnasia with professional instructors, and marble-lined model kitchens. The Black Thread Centre High School was a slate-grey wooden shack with small, dirty windows and no ventilation. The floors were worn into channels around the knots in the boards, and the only decorations were portraits of the good grey poets. The students' desks were cramped, and the teachers still kept apples and punitive rulers on their desks instead of graphs of daily variation in individual suggestibility.