Owen Johnson

Born in New York City in 1878, Owen Johnson was an American novelist and short-story writer whose work drew heavily on his years at the Lawrenceville School and Yale. He is most closely associated with the Dink Stover stories, including Stover at Yale, which followed a young man through prep school and college and helped make Johnson widely known.

Johnson also worked as a journalist and war correspondent during World War I. Alongside his school stories, he wrote novels, short fiction, and nonfiction, building a career that connected literary ambition with firsthand reporting and a sharp eye for social life.

He died in 1952. Today, he is remembered mainly for the Lawrenceville and Yale books, which capture an early-20th-century American world of education, class, friendship, and growing up.