Boarding School
Discover the best boarding school books, from Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld to Old School and The Catcher in the Rye. Explore gripping fiction and coming-of-age classics about elite campus life, friendship, and rebellion in this curated reading list.
Book
Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
A perceptive, achingly funny first novel featuring a middle-class Midwestern teenager trying to fit in at an elite East Coast boarding school, "Prep" is also a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
Book
The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger's classic of adolescent angst is now available for the first time in trade paperback. Holden Caulfield, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
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Old School
by Tobias Wolff
The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself. The agency of revelation is the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.