Owen Johnson

Born in New York City on August 27, 1878, Owen McMahon Johnson became an American novelist and short-story writer whose work drew heavily on his own school and college years. He attended the Lawrenceville School and graduated from Yale in 1901, experiences that later shaped the stories that made him famous.

He is most closely associated with the fictional character Dink Stover and with Stover at Yale, a bestselling novel that offered a lively, sometimes critical portrait of undergraduate life. Johnson wrote about friendship, status, competition, and growing up, and his books were widely read in their day for the way they turned campus life into vivid popular fiction.

During World War I he also worked as a war correspondent for The New York Times and Collier's. He died on January 27, 1952, and is still remembered as a key voice in American school and college stories from the early 1900s.