Booth Tarkinton was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. Seventeen is a tale of youth and summertime romance. William Baxter's seventeenth summer is spent in the throes of first love. William is smitten with Miss Lola Pratt, a visitor who speaks with a babyish lisp--mostly to her dog Flopit. He's also tormented by his ten-year-old sister Jane, who delights in embarrassing him in public.