Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The promised note on Albert Payson Terhune — with a name like that, he’d have to have been at least upper middle class, and he was, he was — and his dog books.

From Wikipedia:

Albert Payson Terhune (December 21, 1872 – February 18, 1942) was an American writer, dog breeder, and journalist. He was popular for his novels relating the adventures of his beloved collies and as a breeder of collies at his Sunnybank Kennels [in Wayne NJ], the lines of which still exist in today’s Rough Collies.

… The first of his novels about his dogs, Lad: A Dog, collected a dozen stories of his collie Lad in novel form [in 1919]. Lad was followed by over 30 additional dog-focused novels, including two additional books about Lad.

… Terhune is now often criticized for his starkly racist depictions of the minorities, hill people and so-called “half-breeds” that peopled parts of northern New Jersey less idealized than Sunnybank.

I’m pretty sure I got my copy of Lad as a gift from my father, who read it and loved it when he was a child (he was born in 1914). I treasured it on its own — I was a friend of dogs — and also because it came from him. I don’t remember the racism, but I did outgrow dog books eventually, choosing to give them away to younger kids when I went on to Princeton, where they would in any case have subjected me to ridicule.

I kept all the Oz books, but didn’t take them with me to Princeton. I was a highschooler, not a preppy; I was pretty obviously not long off the farm; I was working hard at many jobs to get through school; and I was ferociously talented academically — all of which inspired resentment and contempt (I was seen as cheapening the value of Princeton as a bastion of the elite — fortunately, not by everyone, so I managed to survive). Oz would have given off the stink of a prole childhood.

I foolishly tried to ape the cool of prep, though I did learn how to dress well in that style, which turned out to be an essential talent when I needed to fit in with the social elite of Lexington KY a few years later. The twists and turns of life are indeed strange.

Meanwhile, my choosing Princeton over Harvard went back to my admissions interviews, in which (as I recall it) I was, startlingly, recruited by two Nobel Prize winners and a Fields Medalist, all from the Institute for Advanced Study, three men who of course knew absolutely nothing about being an undergraduate at Princeton, but a hell of a lot about mathematics and physics (and steered me firmly away from my intentions to study chemistry, the arts, philosophy, and social sciences, the last three being the very things I wanted especially to get out of Princeton: an actual liberal education. Which I managed to extract anyway, and it was truly wonderful. One more time: the twists and turns of life are indeed strange.

This entry was posted on August 26, 2026 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Books, Clothing, Education, Language and animals, My life, Princeton, Race and ethnicity, Social class. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.